OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around Solaris Operating System technology. It is aimed at developers, system administrators and users who want to develop and improve operating systems. As of June 2007, more than 60,000 community members are registered on OpenSolaris.org with around 2,000 members being employed by Sun Microsystems. An active OpenSolaris User Group community is now growing worldwide, and dozens of OpenSolaris technology communities and projects are being opened on opensolaris.org.
OpenSolaris is derived from the Unix System V Release 4 codebase, and has significant modifications made by Sun since it bought the rights to the codebase in 1994. It is the only open source System V derivative available.
Open sourced components are snapshots of the latest Solaris release under development. Future versions of Solaris will be based on technology from the OpenSolaris project.
Planning for OpenSolaris started in early 2004. A multi-disciplinary team was formed to consider all aspects of the project: licensing, business models, governance, co-development procedures, source code analysis, source code management, tools, marketing, website application design, and community development. A pilot program was formed in September 2004 with 18 non-Sun community members and ran for 9 months growing to 145 external participants.
The opening of the Solaris source code has been an incremental process. The first part of the Solaris codebase to be open sourced was the Solaris Dynamic Tracing facility (commonly known as DTrace), a tracing tool for administrators and developers that aids in tuning a system for optimum performance and utilisation. DTrace was released on January 25, 2005. At that time, Sun also released the first phase of the opensolaris.org web site, announced that the OpenSolaris code base would be released under the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License), and announced the intent to form a Community Advisory Board (CAB). The opening day launch, in which the bulk of the Solaris system code was released, was June 14, 2005. There remains some system code that is not open sourced, and is available only as binary files. The OpenSolaris source code represents the code in the most recent development build of Solaris.
The five CAB members were announced on April 4, 2005: two were elected by the pilot community, two were appointed by Sun, and one was appointed from the broader free software community by Sun. The 2005/2006 OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board members were Roy Fielding, Al Hopper, Rich Teer, Casper Dik, and Simon Phipps. On February 10, 2006 Sun signed the OpenSolaris Charter, turning the OpenSolaris community into an independent group under the leadership of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) 
The former CAB became the first OGB, with the task of creating and confirming the governance of the OpenSolaris Community no later than June 30, 2006. The work of creating the governance document or "Constitution" is now in progress, led by a Governance Working Group comprising 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).
Murdock later revealed the project as "taking the lesson that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris", making a full OpenSolaris distribution with GNOME and userland tools from GNU plus a network-based package management system On May 05, 2008 OpenSolaris 2008.05 was released. It can be booted as a Live CD or installed directly. It uses the GNOME desktop environment as the primary user interface. The release also includes the ZFS file system, a filesystem with advanced snapshotting capabilities.
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 (GPL), Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green 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 of 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.
After entering into the 2003 Sun Agreement, Sun released an opensource version of its UNIX-based Solaris product, called "OpenSolaris." As its name suggests, OpenSolaris is based on Sun's Solaris operating system, which is in turn based on Novell's SVRX intellectual property. Absent the removal of the 1994 Sun Agreement's confidentiality restrictions, Sun would not have been licensed to publicly release the OpenSolaris source code ...In this case, Sun obtained the rights to opensource Solaris, and SCO received the revenue for granting such rights even though such rights remained with Novell. If the court were to declare that the contract was void and should be set aside, the court could not return the parties to the same position they were in prior to the 2003 Agreement. Sun has already received the benefits of the agreement and developed and marketed a product based on those benefits. There was also evidence at trial that OpenSolaris directly competed with Novell’s interest. The court, therefore, cannot merely void the contract.
, first distribution for SPARC , related to Project Pulsar is organized by the German Unix User Group (GUUG).
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