What is OpenSolaris? Reality: (My observation, a bit cynical) --------- OpenSolaris is Sun's Solaris development team's project site. The process has been opened up to the public, to expand the Solaris developer community to include unpaid volunteers. (unpaid by Sun.) Additionally, the Solaris code is now open sourced. Almost everything about the project is driven by Sun's needs. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, as Sun supplies most, if not all the funding. In addition as far as user base of OpenSolaris derived technology, almost all of it is Solaris users.)
Opensolaris.org website: -------------------------------- The project: --------------- "The OpenSolaris project is an open source community and a place for collaboration and conversation around OpenSolaris technology." Three elements: Source code, developer community, website for collaboration extension of OpenSolaris technology. Initially, the OpenSolaris project included source for the core kernel, networking, libraries and commands from the Solaris OS. Since the launch, source for additional parts of the Solaris OS have been released, and even more source will be available over time. Ultimately, the repositories for most of the Solaris OS will be available on opensolaris.org with non-Sun committers. (What does the last sentence mean?) The releases: ----------------- Solaris Express Community Release: This is a binary release for developers. It's Sun's latest, unsupported release of the OpenSolaris bits as well as additional technology that has not been released into the OpenSolaris source base. Developers can build the OpenSolaris source by using this release as the base system. The release also has a code name -- Nevada -- and it's updated every two weeks. (So why are people working on Nevada, if it's a Sun binary release? Wouldn't it also be considered an OpenSolaris reference distro?). OpenSolaris: ---------------- OpenSolaris: This is the source base for Solaris development. Currently, it consists of several technology components called consolidations. See the Downloads Page for details on the technologies that have been released, and the OpenSolaris Roadmap for the schedule of upcoming technology releases. At present, the OpenSolaris source base is not enough to bootstrap an entire system, so developers start by downloading an OpenSolaris distribution and installing the OpenSolaris bits on top. (This implies a goal of having a source base that has enough bits to bootstrap a system.) _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
