Oracle Solaris
Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. After the Sun acquisition by Oracle in 2010, it was renamed Oracle Solaris.
Screenshot of Java Desktop System on Solaris 10 | |
| Developer | Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010) |
|---|---|
| Written in | C, C++ |
| OS family | Unix (SVR4) |
| Working state | Current |
| Source model | Mixed |
| Initial release | June 1992 |
| Latest release | 11.4 SRU61 / September 18, 2023 |
| Marketing target | Server, workstation |
| Platforms | Current: SPARC, x86-64 Former: IA-32, PowerPC |
| Kernel type | Monolithic with dynamically loadable modules |
| Userland | POSIX |
| Default user interface | GNOME |
| License | Various |
| Official website | www |
Solaris superseded the company's earlier SunOS in 1993, and became known for its scalability, especially on SPARC systems, and for originating many innovative features such as DTrace, ZFS and Time Slider. Solaris supports SPARC and x86-64 workstations and servers from Oracle and other vendors. Solaris was registered as compliant with the Single UNIX Specification until 29 April 2019.
Historically, Solaris was developed as proprietary software. In June 2005, Sun Microsystems released most of the codebase under the CDDL license, and founded the OpenSolaris open-source project. With OpenSolaris, Sun wanted to build a developer and user community around the software. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January 2010, Oracle decided to discontinue the OpenSolaris distribution and the development model. In August 2010, Oracle discontinued providing public updates to the source code of the Solaris kernel, effectively turning Solaris 11 back into a closed source proprietary operating system. Following that, OpenSolaris was forked as Illumos and is alive through several illumos distributions. In September 2017, Oracle laid off most of the Solaris teams.
In 2011, the Solaris 11 kernel source code leaked. Through the Oracle Technology Network (OTN), industry partners can gain access to the in-development Solaris source code. Solaris is developed under a proprietary development model, and only the source for open-source components of Solaris 11 is available for download from Oracle.