Sun Microsystems has made its main Solaris operating system
open source to enable it to compete more easily against open source
rival Linux and Microsoft's Windows OS.
Details of the open source move are available at the OpenSolaris
developer community site. The site carries the Solaris source code,
a new source browser, build tools, documentation, a community
portal, mailing lists and developer blogs that carry further
technical information.
The OpenSolaris source code includes the core operating system,
networking, system libraries and commands. Sun plans to open source
other components of the Solaris OS, such as the installation
tools.
The OpenSolaris source base currently stands at 10 million lines of
code and Sun says this will expand as developers contribute further
applications using the Solaris OS.
Sun promised to make Solaris open source at the beginning of the
year and in the meantime it has been distributing specific open
source tools to prepare the developer community for the launch. The
source code is available for the SPARC platform and x86/x64
platforms
www.opensolaris.org