A number of Australian employees of Hewlett-Packard are facing the loss of their jobs as the global computer giant looks to slash its worldwide workforce by up to 30,000.
OpenSolaris is broadly aimed at desktop, server and high performance computing. It is being distributed as a live CD image for ease of trial and installation.
Early adopters include Amazon (which is making OpenSolaris available on its Elastic Compute Cloud), and Reliant Security (for its Managed PCI System for merchants accepting payment cards).
Sun will announce support options for OpenSolaris on May 13.
The company has chosen to release OpenSolaris under the Common Development and Distribution License rather than the GPL or another licence that is widely used in the open source world.
"From a software perspective, it's clear that open source is the right approach and that OpenSolaris provides the platform to participate, innovate and ultimately succeed," said Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president, software. "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."