Jim Laurent's Weblog

I'm frequently confronted by the belief that Solaris is not "really" open source in the same way that the GPLed Linux kernel is open source.  My response is that, in some ways, Solaris is even MORE open than GPLed kernel because the CDDL license allows Solaris features such as DTrace to be moved to other OS distributions such as FreeBSD or MacOS.  It's widely held that the GPL license used by the Linux kernel prevents cross pollination of Linux kernel code with BSD or OpenSolaris code.

That said, there are a variety of alternate versions of OpenSolaris:

• BeleniX is a *NIX distribution that is built using the OpenSolaris source base. It is currently a LiveCD distribution but is intended to grow into a complete distro that can be installed to hard disk. BeleniX has been developed out of Bangalore the silicon capital of India. It is a free time community project initiated by some folks from Sun's India Engineering Center.
• marTux is the first non-Solaris Express/Solaris Express Community Release OpenSolaris distribution for SPARC (sun4u for now, sun4v later). One initial, key feature worth special mention is a complete gcc3 built X.Org X11R6.9 including the actual Xorg server binary and therefore finally with drivers supporting a few pci sparc frame buffers. These are the first working X.Org binaries for sparc – Solaris EVER RELEASED!
• NexentaOS is a complete GNU-based free and open source operating system built on top of the OpenSolaris kernel and runtime. NexentaOS integrates OpenSolaris (SunOS kernel) and Open Source Software (OSS) applications – a foundation that combines the best of both worlds. The best of Linux is its usability that comes with huge amount of high-quality open source software developed over the last two decades. The best of Solaris is its security, stability, scalability, reliability, and availability for the Fortune 2000 enterprise where Solaris is still a king. NexentaOS is currently distributed in a form of InstallCD, LiveCD, and pre-installed VMware images. Updates and upgrades are available via our networked Debian APT repository. Please check http://www.gnusolaris.org/Download for the latest available bits and release notes.
• SchilliX is an OpenSolaris based UNIX Live CD and distribution for the x86, x64 and EM64T architectures. The current release is based on Nevada Build 17 and higher.

The OpenSolaris community is active and there have been several hundred contributions from non-Sun employees.

Keep in mind that if you are looking for an Enterprise OS that's freely licensed and downloadable, you can also get the original Solaris OS from our download center for Sparc and X64 platforms.

Why should you care?

An open source product provides a variety of choices as well as transparency and the opportunity to contribute to improve the product and move it in a different direction than the vendor (Sun) may choose.  The availability of these other distributions provides a number of ways for you to experience OpenSolaris.