Sun Microsystems officially launched OpenSolaris (OS) today. Available pre-built as a combo live/install CD, the initial binary distribution download of OS 2008.05 features a GNOME user interface, highly fault tolerant ZFS root filesystem, IPS package managment, and “DTrace” tuning tools.

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The news came at Sun's CommunityOne warm-up for its massive annual JavaOne Conference. Debian creator Ian Murdoch, now vice president for developer and community marketing at Sun, delivered the opening keynote at CommunityOne. Murdoch also announced that OpenSolaris computing services will be offered by Amazon via its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service suite, which will also continue to offer MySQL following Sun's acquisition of MySQL A.B., one of the companies that offers commercial licenses for the open source database.

Touted features include:

• ZFS used for root filesystem — A fault-tolerant filesystem claimed to support multiple simultaneous drive failures.
• IPS (image packaging system) package management
• DTrace — The binaries in the OpenSolaris release are built with support for this profiling/analyzing tool, which is also obviously included in the distribution

OpenSolaris is licensed under Sun's CDDL license, accepted as an “open source” license by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), despite incompatibilities with many other open source licenses, such as the GPL. Sun also licensed Java under the CDDL for many years, before offering its Java runtimes and development kits under the GPL more recently.

A lengthy license welcomes the user
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In the past, Sun has talked about using the GPL3 for OpenSolaris. Linux creator Linus Torvalds has notably said he might reconsider advocating a GPL3 release of Linux, should Sun follow through. Releases of both under the same or at least compatible open source licenses could improve both OSes, by enabling code sharing.

Luckily, I had an old Intel NIC sitting around
(Click to enlarge)

Sun last fall launched a Developer Preview of OpenSolaris. Subsequently, it announced an OpenSolaris for IBM mainframes port.

To support the new distribution, Sun has launched an OpenSolaris.com website, supplementing its pre-existant OpenSolaris.org site. OpenSolaris downloads and torrent links can be found on the dot-com site.

— Henry Kingman

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