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How is Solaris developed and maintained?

Created on 2025-03-25 17:51:48
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Solaris is a Unix-based operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems and later acquired by Oracle Corporation. It is developed and maintained through a combination of in-house development teams and the open-source community, particularly through the OpenSolaris project, which was active until its discontinuation in 2010.

Development of Solaris involves several key processes:

  1. In-house Development: Oracle's internal teams continue to develop and maintain the core Solaris operating system. This includes adding new features, improving performance, and enhancing security.
  2. Open Source Contributions: Although OpenSolaris is no longer active, some of its contributions have been integrated into Solaris. The OpenSolaris community provided additional software packages, utilities, and features that were incorporated into the mainline Solaris OS.
  3. Community Engagement: Oracle engages with the broader Unix and open-source communities to gather feedback, suggestions, and contributions that can be incorporated into future releases.

Maintenance of Solaris includes regular updates, patches for security vulnerabilities, and bug fixes. These are typically released through Oracle's support channels, ensuring that enterprise users have access to stable and secure versions of the operating system.

Example: An example of ongoing development and maintenance in Solaris is the introduction of new features like ZFS (Zettabyte File System) for advanced data storage management and DTrace for dynamic tracing of system behavior, which were developed and refined over time through both in-house efforts and community contributions.

For cloud-related services, Oracle offers Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which provides a comprehensive suite of cloud services including computing, storage, networking, and databases. OCI is designed to support a wide range of applications and workloads, similar to how Solaris supports diverse enterprise needs on-premises.