A pilot program was formed in September 2004 with 18 non-Sun community members and ran for 9 months growing to 145 external participants.

[14] Sun submitted the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) to the OSI, which approved it on January 14, 2005.

The members were Roy Fielding, Al Hopper, Rich Teer, Casper Dik, and Simon Phipps.

[16] The task of creating a governance document or "constitution" for this organization was given to the OGB and three invited members: Stephen Hahn and Keith Wesolowski (developers in Sun's Solaris organization) and Ben Rockwood (a prominent OpenSolaris community member).

[19] On March 19, 2007, Sun announced that it had hired Ian Murdock, founder of Debian, to head Project Indiana,[20] an effort to produce a complete OpenSolaris distribution, with GNOME and userland tools from GNU, plus a network-based package management system.

[30] On November 12, 2010, a final build of OpenSolaris (134b) was published by Oracle to the /release repository to serve as an upgrade path to Solaris 11 Express.

Packages for development releases of OpenSolaris were published by Oracle typically every two weeks to the /dev repository.

Only Sun customers with paid support contracts have access to updates for production releases.

[39] Paid support for production releases which allows access to security updates and bug fixes was offered by Sun through the /support repository on pkg.sun.com.

[40] Extensive OpenSolaris administration, usage, and development documentation is available online,[41] including community-contributed information.

In January 2007, eWeek reported that anonymous sources at Sun had told them OpenSolaris would be dual-licensed under CDDL and GPLv3.

[45] Green responded in his blog the next day that the article was incorrect, saying that although Sun is giving "very serious consideration" to such a dual-licensing arrangement, it would be subject to agreement by the rest of the OpenSolaris community.

[46] The first annual OpenSolaris Developer Conference (abbreviated as OSDevCon) was organized by the German Unix User Group (GUUG) and took place from February 27 to March 2, 2007, at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany.

[49] In 2007, Sun Microsystems organized the first OpenSolaris Developer Summit, which was held on the weekend of October 13, 2007, at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the United States.

[53] On November 3, 2009, a Solaris/OpenSolaris Security Summit was held by Sun in the Inner Harbor area of Baltimore, Maryland, preceding the Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA).