Few weeks after ordering opensolaris starter kit it arrived to my mailbox yesterday. As I was looking at it I started wondering how open source philosophy is making an impact. We all know that just over a year or two ago this OS, behind which millions of $ were spent in developing it, and Sun used to charge for the OS, “all of a sudden” has become freely available and besides that they are happy that we, the users, are ordering this starter kit ….. imagine 5-7 years back telling Sun that the day will come when you will be happily giving away your Solaris OS for free worldwide ….. times change. Now will Sun provide their Solaris under GPL3 in future.

This kit will help you learn about the OpenSolaris source code and the community. On the DVDs, you’ll find:

• Solaris Express
  — Preview future features of Sun’s Solaris Operating System. Also inside: ZFS, DTrace, Containers, and hundreds of other unique features.
• Live CDs — These bootable images allow you to check out community-built distributions of OpenSolaris, each with unique features:
  
  - Nexenta OS
  - BeleniX
  - SchilliX
• Sun Studio compilers — Get advanced features for developing applications on Sun Solaris platforms.
• OpenSolaris source code.
• System Requirements — x86/x64 based system.

Even though it will take just few hours for me download all this from internet, it does feel nice having such a kit lying around next to my computer. Go and get free Starter Kit.

Screencast: Solaris Express, Developer Edition Installation (8 min, 21 sec)

Boot screens (running via VMware):