Solaris and OpenSource

A few posts before I was talking about the BSD family.

Another very interesting UNIX system is Solaris of Sun Microsystems company. I read about it one year ago and I liked the "Software containers". A few weeks ago I read about the OpenSolaris Project. Sun has released some of Solaris code to the open source community just like the OpenOffice.
The "Software Containers" are now called "Zones" and it has to do with security.

According to Sun Microsystems
"Zones provide a new isolation primitive for the Solaris OS, which is secure, flexible, scalable and lightweight: virtualized OS services which look like different Solaris instances. Together with the existing Solaris Resource management framework, Solaris Zones forms the basis of Solaris Containers. " (click here for more information).

And
"The main difference between the OpenSolaris project and the Solaris Operating System is that the OpenSolaris project does not provide an end-user product or complete distribution".

Many new projects have started as Sun ,I suppose, wanted. Some are Linux related like the Nexenta distro, some are Linux-like as Schllix and some others are just a support to Solaris OS.

Some interesting links are:
OpenSolaris -Main development site, with source code and mailing lists.
The Nexenta (Debian-OpenSolaris combination) distro.
The Schllix OpenSolaris distro.
The official Solaris product page.
Information about Solaris on x86 PCs.
Binary packages for Solaris.