In June 2005, Sun Microsystems released most of the codebase under the CDDL license, and founded the OpenSolaris open-source project.

[9] Sun aimed to build a developer and user community with OpenSolaris; after the Oracle acquisition in 2010, the OpenSolaris distribution was discontinued[10][11] and later discontinued providing public updates to the source code of the Solaris kernel, effectively turning Solaris version 11 back into a closed source proprietary operating system.

[15] The justification for this new overbrand was that it encompassed not only SunOS, but also the OpenWindows graphical user interface and Open Network Computing (ONC) functionality.

[18] In 1994, Sun released Solaris 2.4, supporting both SPARC and x86 systems from a unified source code base.

[citation needed] Solaris has a reputation for being well-suited to symmetric multiprocessing, supporting a large number of CPUs.

This has led to more reliable systems, but at a cost premium compared to commodity PC hardware.

[30] In January 2006, a community of developers at Blastwave began work on a PowerPC port which they named Polaris.

[34] On November 28, 2007, IBM, Sun, and Sine Nomine Associates demonstrated a preview of OpenSolaris for System z running on an IBM System z mainframe under z/VM,[35] called Sirius (in analogy to the Polaris project, and also due to the primary developer's Australian nationality: HMS Sirius of 1786 was a ship of the First Fleet to Australia).

[38] Solaris can be installed from various pre-packaged software groups, ranging from a minimalistic Reduced Network Support to a complete Entire Plus OEM.

There are several types of updates within each major release, including the Software Packages, and the Oracle Solaris Image.

NeWS allowed applications to be built in an object-oriented way using PostScript, a common printing language released in 1982.

In 2001, Sun issued a preview release of the open-source desktop environment GNOME 1.4, based on the GTK+ toolkit, for Solaris 8.

[44] Likewise, CDE applications are no longer included in Solaris 11, but many libraries remain for binary backwards compatibility.

The open source desktop environments KDE and Xfce, along with numerous other window managers, also compile and run on recent versions of Solaris.

[47] In March 2010, the previously freely available Solaris 10 was placed under a restrictive license that limited the use, modification and redistribution of the operating system.

[48] The license allowed the user to download the operating system free of charge, through the Oracle Technology Network, and use it for a 90-day trial period.

After that trial period had expired the user would then have to purchase a support contract from Oracle to continue using the operating system.

Each version such as Solaris 10 is based on a snapshot of this development codebase, taken near the time of its release, which is then maintained as a derived project.

[94] A later change to this program introduced a quarterly release model with support available, renamed Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE).

[96] It was updated every two weeks until it was discontinued in January 2010, with a recommendation that users migrate to the OpenSolaris distribution.

[97] Although the download license seen when downloading the image files indicates its use is limited to personal, educational and evaluation purposes, the license acceptance form displayed when the user actually installs from these images lists additional uses including commercial and production environments.

Instead, Oracle renamed the binary distribution Solaris 11 Express, changed the license terms and released build 151a as 2010.11 in November 2010.

What may is the platform's reliability, flexibility, and power.Be that as it may, since the Solaris 10 download is free, it behooves any IT manager to load it on an extra server and at least give it a try.Solaris 10 provides a flexible background for securely dividing system resources, providing performance guarantees and tracking usage for these containers.

But some cases may require quite a bit of fine-tuning.I think that Sun has put some really nice touches on Solaris 10 that make it a better operating system for both administrators and users.