> From: opensolaris-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:opensolaris- > discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Erik Trimble > > OpenSolaris is dead. Long Live OpenSolaris!
Hey, that's my line! ;-) > This is going to be a bit confusing, but here are things you need to know: I'm going to simplify (and change ;-) everything Erik said, for a newbie: Opensolaris 2009.06 is the latest, and final, official release of opensolaris. It's 2 years old. Don't use it. Opensolaris build 134 is the latest and final development release of opensolaris. It's stable, but it's about a year old. It's available from genunix.org. Use it if you require something which is and always will be free. Unfortunately, there is no more development on this, so updates will not happen. OpenIndiana is the new open source branch based on illumos which replaces opensolaris. However, it's very new, and they're going through growing pains right now. They're fairly stable, but not rock solid yet. Use it if you require something which is and always will be free, that also includes updates. Solaris 11 Express is the closed-source oracle replacement for opensolaris. It is free for some purposes. Read the license terms to see if it's suitable for you. What it basically boils down to is that it's free for development work, but not free for production. This is based on honor system. Solaris 11 Express is the most advanced opensolaris derivative, meaning, it is already more feature-advanced and more stable than the open source alternatives, because it's being developed faster with more resources behind it. Use it if you expect to be using Solaris 11 (commercial) in production and you want to learn on the environment which is the most similar. Solaris 10u9 is the current commercial release. I think it's released under the same license terms as solaris 11 express. I don't know when solaris 10 will be replaced by solaris 11, but that is obviously coming. Use it if you expect or need a commercially supported system now. Solaris 10u8 is still available for download, under the old license terms which permit you to use it in production for free. Use it if you want to learn the most-similar-to-commercial product for free. Especially if you are going to run it in a virtual machine, solaris 10u8 is well supported in vmware. For what it's worth, many admins running critical production servers will choose to use solaris commercial on sun hardware. Many others will choose to run nexenta commercial (which is open source) on non-sun hardware. You should keep it in mind as a possibility, but it's less mainstream, but at least deserves an honorable mention. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
