OpenSolaris, the open-source variant of Sun's popular Solaris operating system, has finally exited development with the release today of OpenSolaris 2008.05 [1].

OpenSolaris has been in development for the past three years, and numbers more than 60,000 contributors in it's community, a small fraction of whom are on the payroll at Sun. The distribution is — obviously — based on Solaris, Sun's flagship OS, with the bulk of the code-base comprised of original Solaris code released under the Common Development and Distribution License. Solaris is, in turn originally developed from Unix System V, Release 4 — the system which forms the basis of the litigation between SCO and Novell [2], which went to trial last week [3].

Sun added a second feather to their cap via a deal with Amazon to offer OpenSolaris as part of the Elastic Compute Cloud offered through Amazon.com. At the moment, the system is only available to developers by invitation [4] as Amazon works on the infrastructure to offer it on a large scale.
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Justin Ryan is News Editor [5] for LinuxJournal.com.
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