Solaris, formerly known as SunOS, is a trademarked UNIX operating system derived from 4.4BSD-Lite and System V Release 4. It's a combination of BSD, SVR4, and proprietary Sun code, and it currently powers most of the world's 64-bit workstations. It was originally designed for the SPARC and UltraSPARC platforms, but it has moved into the x86 market as well and there will be an AMD64 port possibly as early as Q1 2004.

Source code for the Solaris operating system

is available without a fee. It probably doesn\'t

qualify as Open Source as defined by Bruce Perens

but might still be of interest to readers.

It\'s not \"Lord of the Rings\" but this is certainly a fellowship. Ximian, Inc., Wipro, and Sun Microsystems Monday say they will jointly develop an open source desktop environment for the Solaris Operating Environment (OE) based on the upcoming GNOME 2.0.