OpenSolaris to go live next week

After having dipped a Solaris toe into the open-source waters last January, Sun Microsystems will take the full plunge next week. The company's OpenSolaris effort will go live early next week, a Sun representative said Tuesday.

Sun initially said it would release OpenSolaris in 2004. Instead, it released one piece, a performance utility called DTrace, in January, and said it would release the rest by the end of June.

Sun is releasing Solaris under a license called the Community Development and Distribution License, a variant of the Mozilla Public License. OpenSolaris is aimed at popularizing Sun's version of Unix compared to rivals such as Windows, Linux, HP-UX and IBM's AIX.