Sons of Solaris

When it released the source code to its Solaris operating system, Sun Microsystems bet that people would pick it up and run. Sun said it wanted to see a community form around the OpenSolaris code, and take it beyond what the company had done with it in its more than 25 years of development of the OS. Today the community Sun was looking for seems to be coming to life.

Since the OpenSolaris community was launched in June, at least three derivative distributions - - SchilliX, BeleniX , and Nexenta -- have been created and released. Parts of OpenSolaris are also making their way into other operating systems. A port of DTrace is in the works for FreeBSD.