Sun Microsystems has announced its first supported version of the open-source OpenSolaris operating system. The project was created in 2005 by Sun aiming to build a developer community around its Solaris Operating System technology. The 2008.5 distribution has been made available and an official price list for support will become available on May 13. The announcement came at the CommunityOne conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center today.

The OpenSolaris distribution builds upon the strength of the Unix System V Release 4 codebase, with significant improvements by Sun. As such is the only open source System V-based operating system available. Solaris is also based on the same codebase.

“OpenSolaris provides an ideal environment for students, developers and early adopters looking to learn and gain experience with innovative technologies like ZFS, Zones and DTrace. And yes, it uses bash by default,” said Stephen Lau, OpenSolaris Governing Board member at CommunityOne.

It also the first OS to feature ZFS as its default file system. ZFS includes features such as support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, on-line integrity checking and repair, and RAID-Z.

“I’m tremendously proud of the work the OpenSolaris community has put forth and believe the new OpenSolaris OS sets the innovation benchmark for what's possible in an open source world,” said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software, Sun Microsystems.

OpenSolaris will also be available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Sun also offers premium technical support for its MySQL database running on Amazon EC2.

“With OpenSolaris and MySQL technical support now available on EC2, developers and IT staff gain powerful platform and database options for building scalable and reliable applications on Amazon's cloud computing platform,” said Adam Selipsky, vice president, Product Management and Developer Relations, Amazon Web Services in a press statement.

Apparently, OpenSolaris is released under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), an approved open source license, which is however different than the more popular GNU General Public License (GPL).