It is an Association in terms of Article 60-79 of the Swiss Civil Code with domicile in Greifensee/ZH, Switzerland.

The purpose of the association is to provide software packages that run on currently supported production versions of the Solaris Operating Environment.

It was founded as a fork by former members of the "CSW" packaging project,[1] previously hosted at Blastwave.

It is possibly the only site to make full advantage of SVR4 "Class Action Scripts", which standardize common pkgadd-type operations, eliminating the need for security prompting about most per-class custom install scripts.

With the disappearance of Blastwave and the removal of free downloads of SunFreeware on 30 September 2013, OpenCSW is the biggest source of Solaris packages.