Solaris

The Solaris Operating System, usually known simply as Solaris, is a free Unix-based operating system introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1992 as the successor to SunOS. Solaris is known for its scalability, especially on SPARC systems, as well for being the origin for many innovative features such as DTrace and ZFS. Solaris supports SPARC-based and x86-based workstations and servers from Sun and other vendors, with efforts underway to port to additional platforms. Solaris is certified against the Single Unix Specification. Although it was historically developed as proprietary software, a majority of its codebase is now open source software as OpenSolaris. According to Sun, "Future releases of the Solaris OS will be built from the OpenSolaris source code, but will still be supported in the same manner as current versions of the Solaris OS. At any given time, there may be some software in either the OpenSolaris project or the Solaris OS product that is not present in the other. However, over time the intent is to release as much of the existing source code as possible through the OpenSolaris project and for future development of the source to take place in the OpenSolaris community." [http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/]