OpenSolaris () is a discontinued
open-source computer
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
based on
Solaris and created by
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...
. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the eponymous operating system software.
OpenSolaris is a descendant of the
UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) code base developed by Sun and
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile ...
in the late 1980s and is the only version of the System V variant of UNIX available as open source. OpenSolaris was developed as a combination of several software ''consolidations'' that were open sourced starting with
Solaris 10
Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. After the Sun acquisition by Oracle in 2010, it was renamed Oracle Solaris.
Solaris superseded the company's earlier SunOS in 1993, and became known fo ...
. It includes a variety of
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...
, including popular
desktop and
server
Server may refer to:
Computing
*Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients
Role
* Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...
software.
After Oracle’s
acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle discontinued development of OpenSolaris in house, pivoting to focus exclusively on the development of the proprietary
Solaris Express
Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. After the Sun acquisition by Oracle in 2010, it was renamed Oracle Solaris.
Solaris superseded the company's earlier SunOS in 1993, and became known fo ...
(now
Oracle Solaris).
Prior to Oracle's
close-sourcing Solaris, a group of former OpenSolaris developers began efforts to
fork the core software under the name
OpenIndiana
OpenIndiana is a free and open-source Illumos#Current_distributions, illumos distribution Unix-derived UNIX_System_V, System V SVR4 operating system, started as OpenSolaris continuation project. fork (software development), Forked from OpenSolar ...
. The
illumos Foundation, founded in the wake of the discontinuation of OpenSolaris, continues to develop and maintain the
kernel and
userland of OpenIndiana (together renamed “illumos”), while the OpenIndiana Project (now under the auspices of the illumos Foundation) continues to maintain and develop the illumos-based OpenIndiana distribution (including its installer and build system) as the direct descendant of OpenIndiana.
Since then additional
illumos distributions, both commercial and non-commercial, have appeared and are under active development, combining the illumos kernel and userland with custom installers, packaging and build systems, and other distribution-specific utilities and tooling.
History
OpenSolaris was based on Solaris, which was originally released by
Sun in 1991. Solaris is a version of
UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4), jointly developed by Sun and AT&T to merge features from several existing
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...
systems. It was licensed by Sun from
Novell to replace
SunOS
SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on BSD, while versions 5.0 an ...
.
Planning for OpenSolaris started in early 2004. A pilot program was formed in September 2004 with 18 non-Sun community members and ran for 9 months growing to 145 external participants. Sun submitted the
CDDL
The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free and open-source software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under ...
(Common Development and Distribution License) to the
OSI, which approved it on January 14, 2005.
The first part of the Solaris code base to be open-sourced was the Solaris Dynamic Tracing facility (commonly known as
DTrace), a tool that aids in the analysis, debugging, and tuning of applications and systems. DTrace was released under the CDDL on January 25, 2005, on the newly launched ''opensolaris.org'' website. The bulk of the Solaris system code was released on June 14, 2005. There remains some system code that is not open source and is available only as pre-compiled
binary files.
To direct the newly fledged project, a Community Advisory Board was announced on April 4, 2005: two were elected by the pilot community, two were employees appointed by Sun, and one was appointed from the broader
free software community by Sun. The members were
Roy Fielding, Al Hopper, Rich Teer, Casper Dik, and
Simon Phipps. On February 10, 2006, Sun approved ''The OpenSolaris Charter'', which reestablished this body as the independent OpenSolaris Governing Board. The task of creating a governance document or "constitution" for this organization was given to the OGB and three invited members: Stephen Hahn and Keith Wesolowski (developers in Sun's Solaris organization) and Ben Rockwood (a prominent OpenSolaris community member). The former next-generation Solaris OS version under development by Sun to eventually succeed Solaris 10 was
codenamed 'Nevada', and was derived from what was the OpenSolaris codebase and this new code was then pulled into new OpenSolaris 'Nevada' snapshot builds. ''"While under Sun Microsystems' control, there were bi-weekly snapshots of Solaris Nevada (the codename for the next-generation Solaris OS to eventually succeed Solaris 10), and this new code was then pulled into new OpenSolaris preview snapshots available at Genunix.org. The stable releases of OpenSolaris are based on these Nevada builds."''
Initially, Sun's
''Solaris Express'' program provided a distribution based on the OpenSolaris code in combination with software found only in Solaris releases. The first independent distribution was released on June 17, 2005, and many others have emerged since.
On March 19, 2007, Sun announced that it had hired
Ian Murdock
Ian Ashley Murdock (April28, 1973 – December 28, 2015) was an American software engineer, known for being the founder of the Debian project and Progeny Linux Systems, a commercial Linux company.
Life and career
Although Murdock's parents ...
, founder of
Debian, to head ''Project Indiana'', an effort to produce a complete OpenSolaris distribution, with
GNOME and
userland tools from
GNU, plus a network-based
package management system
A package manager or package-management system is a collection of software tools that automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer in a consistent manner.
A package manager deals w ...
. The new distribution was planned to refresh the user experience and would become the successor to Solaris Express as the basis for future releases of Solaris.
On May 5, 2008, OpenSolaris 2008.05 was released in a format that could be booted as a
Live CD
A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading f ...
or installed directly. It uses the
GNOME desktop environment as the primary user interface. The later OpenSolaris 2008.11 release included a GUI for
ZFS' snapshotting capabilities, known as Time Slider, that provides functionality similar to
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...
's
Time Machine.
In December 2008, Sun Microsystems and
Toshiba America Information Systems
, formerly Toshiba Client Solutions Co., Ltd., is a Japanese personal computer manufacturer owned by Sharp Corporation; it was owned by, and branded as, Toshiba from 1958 to 2018. It claims its Toshiba T1100, launched in 1985, as the first mass- ...
announced plans to distribute Toshiba laptops pre-installed with OpenSolaris. On April 1, 2009, the
Tecra M10 and
Portégé R600 came preinstalled with OpenSolaris 2008.11 release and several supplemental software packages.
On June 1, 2009, OpenSolaris 2009.06 was released, with support for the SPARC platform.
On January 6, 2010, it was announced that the Solaris Express program would be closed while an OpenSolaris binary release was scheduled to be released on March 26, 2010. The OpenSolaris 2010.03 release never appeared.
On August 13, 2010, Oracle was rumored to have discontinued the OpenSolaris binary distribution to focus on the Solaris Express binary distribution program. Source code would continue to be accepted from the community and Oracle source code would continue to be released into Open Source, but Oracle code releases would occur only after binary releases. The internal email was released by an OpenSolaris kernel developer but was unconfirmed by Oracle.
There was a post confirming the leak posted to the OpenSolaris Forums on August 13, 2010. Upstream contributions will continue through a new Oracle website, downstream source code publishing will continue, and binary distribution will continue under the old Solaris Express model, the but release of source code will occur after binary cuts, and binary cuts will become less frequent.
On September 14, 2010,
OpenIndiana
OpenIndiana is a free and open-source Illumos#Current_distributions, illumos distribution Unix-derived UNIX_System_V, System V SVR4 operating system, started as OpenSolaris continuation project. fork (software development), Forked from OpenSolar ...
was formally launched at the
JISC Centre in
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
. While OpenIndiana is a fork in the technical sense, it is a continuation of OpenSolaris in spirit: the project intends to deliver a System V family operating system that is binary-compatible with the Oracle products Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express. However, rather than being based around the OS/Net consolidation like OpenSolaris was, OpenIndiana became a distribution based on
illumos (the first release is still based around OS/Net). The project uses the same IPS package management system as OpenSolaris.
On November 12, 2010, a final build of OpenSolaris (134b) was published by Oracle to the /release repository to serve as an upgrade path to Solaris 11 Express.
Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11, a preview of Solaris 11 and the first release of the post-OpenSolaris distribution from Oracle, was released on November 15, 2010.
Version history
Release model
OpenSolaris was offered as both development (unstable) and production (stable) releases.
* Development releases were built from the latest OpenSolaris codebase (consolidations) and included newer technologies, security updates and bug fixes, and more applications, but may not have undergone extensive testing.
* Production releases were branched from a snapshot of the development codebase (following a
code freeze) and underwent a
QA process that includes
backporting security updates and bug fixes.
OpenSolaris can be installed from
CD-ROM,
USB drives, or over a network with the Automated Installer. CD, USB, and network install images are made available for both types of releases.
Repositories
OpenSolaris uses a network-aware
package management system
A package manager or package-management system is a collection of software tools that automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer in a consistent manner.
A package manager deals w ...
called the ''
Image Packaging System
The Image Packaging System, also known as IPS or pkg(5), is a cross-platform package management system created by the OpenSolaris community in coordination with Sun Microsystems. It is used by Solaris 11, several illumos-based distributions: Open ...
'' (also known as pkg(5)) to add, remove, and manage installed software and to update to newer releases.
Packages for development releases of OpenSolaris were published by Oracle typically every two weeks to the ''/dev'' repository. Production releases use the ''/release'' repository which does not receive updates until the next production release. Only Sun customers with paid support contracts have access to updates for production releases.
Paid support for production releases which allows access to security updates and bug fixes was offered by Sun through the ''/support'' repository on ''pkg.sun.com''.
Documentation
A
hardware compatibility list A hardware compatibility list (HCL) is a list of computer hardware (typically including many types of peripheral devices) that is compatible with a particular operating system or device management software. In today's world, there is a vast amount o ...
(HCL) for OpenSolaris can be consulted when choosing hardware for OpenSolaris deployment.
Extensive OpenSolaris administration, usage, and development documentation is available online, including community-contributed information.
License
Sun released most of the Solaris source code under the ''Common Development and Distribution License'' (
CDDL
The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free and open-source software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under ...
), which is based on the
Mozilla Public License
The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the conce ...
(MPL) version 1.1. The CDDL was approved as an open source license by the
Open Source Initiative
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software. It is a California public-benefit nonprofit corporation, with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.
The organization wa ...
(OSI) in January 2005. Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary.
During Sun's announcement of Java's release under the
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...
(GPL),
Jonathan Schwartz and
Rich Green
Rich may refer to:
Common uses
* Rich, an entity possessing wealth
* Rich, an intense flavor, color, sound, texture, or feeling
** Rich (wine), a descriptor in wine tasting
Places United States
* Rich, Mississippi, an unincorporated comm ...
both hinted at the possibility of releasing Solaris under the GPL, with Green saying he was "certainly not" averse to relicensing under the GPL. When Schwartz pressed him (jokingly), Green said Sun would "take a very close look at it." In January 2007,
eWeek reported that anonymous sources at Sun had told them OpenSolaris would be dual-licensed under CDDL and GPLv3. Green responded in his blog the next day that the article was incorrect, saying that although Sun is giving "very serious consideration" to such a dual-licensing arrangement, it would be subject to agreement by the rest of the OpenSolaris community.
Conferences
The first annual OpenSolaris Developer Conference (abbreviated as OSDevCon) was organized by the
German Unix User Group
The German Unix User Group (GUUG) is a registered association of German Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started i ...
(GUUG) and took place from February 27 to March 2, 2007 at the
Freie Universität Berlin in
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwee ...
. The 2008 OSDevCon was a joint effort of the GUUG and the Czech OpenSolaris User Group (CZOSUG) and look place June 25–27, 2008 in
Prague
Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...
,
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic, or simply Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. The ...
. The 2009 OSDevCon look place October 27–30, 2009, in
Dresden
Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth ...
,
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwee ...
.
In 2007, Sun Microsystems organized the first OpenSolaris Developer Summit, which was held on the weekend of October 13, 2007, at the
University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the ed ...
in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...
. The 2008 OpenSolaris Developer Summit returned to UCSC on May 2–3, 2008, and took place immediately prior to the launch of Sun's new OpenSolaris distribution on May 5, 2008, at the
CommunityOne
__NOTOC__
JavaOne is an annual conference first organized in 1996 by Sun Microsystems to discuss Java technologies, primarily among Java developers. It was held in San Francisco, California, typically running from a Monday to Thursday in summer m ...
conference in
San Francisco, California
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...
.
The first OpenSolaris Storage Summit was organized by Sun and held September 21, 2008, preceding the
SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC), in
Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara (; Spanish for " Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 census, making it the eighth-most populous city in the Bay Area. Located in the southern Bay Area, the cit ...
. The second OpenSolaris Storage Summit preceded the
USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST) on February 23, 2009, in San Francisco, United States.
On November 3, 2009, a Solaris/OpenSolaris Security Summit was held by Sun in the
Inner Harbor area of
Baltimore, Maryland
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic, and the 30th most populous city in the United States with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore wa ...
, preceding the
Large Installation System Administration Conference
Large means of great size.
Large may also refer to:
Mathematics
* Arbitrarily large, a phrase in mathematics
* Large cardinal, a property of certain transfinite numbers
* Large category, a category with a proper class of objects and morphisms (or ...
(LISA).
Ports
*
PowerPC Port: Project Polaris, experimental PowerPC port, based on the previous porting effort, Project Pulsar from Sun Labs.
*
OpenSolaris for System z, for
IBM mainframes: Project Sirius, developed by Sine Nomine Associates, named as an analogy to Polaris.
* OpenSolaris on
ARM Port
* OpenSolaris on
MIPS Port
Derivatives
Notable derivatives include:
*
illumos, a fully open source fork of the project, started in 2010 by a community of Sun OpenSolaris engineers and the NexentaOS support. Note that OpenSolaris was not 100% open source: Some drivers and some libraries were property of other companies that Sun (now Oracle) licensed and was not able to release.
*
OpenIndiana
OpenIndiana is a free and open-source Illumos#Current_distributions, illumos distribution Unix-derived UNIX_System_V, System V SVR4 operating system, started as OpenSolaris continuation project. fork (software development), Forked from OpenSolar ...
, a project under the illumos umbrella aiming "''... to become the defacto OpenSolaris distribution installed on production servers where security and bug fixes are required free of charge.''"
*
NexentaStor, optimized for storage workloads, based on Nexenta OS
*
OSDyson
Dyson was a Unix general-purpose operating system derived from Debian using the illumos kernel, libc, and SMF init system.
Dyson was built from scratch to be as similar to Debian as possible, i.e. most of Debian packages should build on Dyson wi ...
: illumos kernel with
GNU userland and packages from
Debian. Strives to become an official Debian port.
*
SmartOS
SmartOS is a free and open-source SVR4 hypervisor based on the UNIX operating system that combines OpenSolaris technology with Linux's KVM virtualization. Its core kernel contributed to the illumos project. It features several technologies: C ...
: Virtualization-centered derivative from
Joyent
Joyent Inc. was a software and services company based in San Francisco, California. Specializing in cloud computing, it marketed infrastructure-as-a-service.
On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by Samsung Electronics.
Services
Triton, Joye ...
.
Discontinued
*
Nexenta OS (discontinued October 31, 2012), first distribution based on
Ubuntu
Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...
userland with Solaris-derived kernel
See also
*
Comparison of OpenSolaris distributions
*
Comparison of open source operating systems
These tables compare free software / open-source operating systems. Where not all of the versions support a feature, the first version which supports it is listed.
General information
Supported architectures
Supported hardware
Gene ...
*
Image Packaging System
The Image Packaging System, also known as IPS or pkg(5), is a cross-platform package management system created by the OpenSolaris community in coordination with Sun Microsystems. It is used by Solaris 11, several illumos-based distributions: Open ...
*
OpenSolaris Network Virtualization and Resource Control
Solaris network virtualization and resource control is a set of features originally developed by Sun Microsystems as the OpenSolaris Crossbow umbrella project, providing an internal network virtualization and quality of service framework within t ...
*
Darwin (operating system)
References
Further reading
*
*
External links
*
*
OpenSolaris archive and downloads
{{DEFAULTSORT:Opensolaris
OpenSolaris
2008 software
Discontinued operating systems
Formerly proprietary software
Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media
Software using the CDDL license
Sun Microsystems software