OpenSolaris is finally here!

After months NDA-protected, behind-the-scenes-work, the veils have finally been lifted: OpenSolaris is open to everyone, starting today! Now everyone can do today what the 140 or so pilot program participants (including yours truely) have been doing for about 6 months: read, modify, and build the Solaris source code. (Strictly speaking, the currently available code is from the ON (OS and Networking) consildation, which is the kernel and the "core" commands and daemons. More will be coming later.)

All the code, tools, and documentation can be found at www.opensolaris.org, which also contains tons of other stuff. (The first 1,000 visitors can also claim a free T shirt!)

With the release of the Solaris source code, Sun is very probably the single largest donor of software to the open source community, a position held until recently by the University of California, Berkely. Sun are certainly the number one corporate donor of source code: more than IBM, HP, Red Hat, and anyone else. I think a lot of naysayers (those who said that Sun would never release the Solaris source code under an OSI-approved open source llicense) will be eating their (Red) Hats...

Those who think that OpenSolaris will be a Sun-only project need not worry: Joerg Schilling's Schillix contains OpenSolaris technology, and there is a port to PowerPC under way. Our friends at Gentoo are also planning to release a distribution, and others will no doubt join the party.

If you're a technology-minded developer, you owe it to yourself to at least check out OpenSolaris. Join the growing OpenSolaris community, and help us make the world's best OS even better!

Ladies and gentlemen, start your downloads!