Sun Solaris

Solaris at sun.com

OpenSolaris

Solaris is a computer operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. It is certified against the Single Unix Specification as a version of Unix, and although historically a closed-source product, a majority of the codebase has been open-sourced by Sun Microsystems.

In the early 1990s, Sun replaced the BSD-derived SunOS 4 with a version of UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4), jointly developed with AT&T. The underlying release name was SunOS 5.0, but a new marketing name was introduced at the same time: Solaris 2. While SunOS 4.1.x micro releases were retroactively named Solaris 1 by Sun, the name Solaris is almost exclusively used to refer to SVR4-derived SunOS 5.0 and later.

Solaris is considered to be the SunOS operating system plus a graphical user environment, ONC+, and other components. The SunOS minor version is included in the Solaris release name; for example, Solaris 2.4 incorporated SunOS 5.4. After Solaris 2.6, Sun dropped the "2." from the name, so Solaris 7 incorporates SunOS 5.7, and the latest release SunOS 5.10 forms the core of Solaris 10.