Differences with Linux and Windows

Even though OpenSolaris is free and open source similar to Linux, it is different in many ways. Unlike the Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE, which are based on the Linux kernel, OpenSolaris is based on the Solaris kernel. This makes OpenSolaris fundamentally different from all the Linux based operating systems.

But both OpenSolaris and Linux (and many other Unix like operating systems) are POSIX compliant (which is an industry standard for Unix based OS) and so thousands of applications which run on Linux based operating systems, also run on OpenSolaris. Moreover, OpenSolaris has many unique features, which are not available on any flavour of Linux. For example, while Linux uses Ext3 or Ext4 file systems, OpenSolaris uses the ZFS file system which is a much more advanced file system. We will discuss ZFS in greater detail later in the book.

OpenSolaris also provides developer tools like DTrace, which allow programmers and system administrators to probe the inner functioning of an applications while it is still running. DTrace will be covered in details as well. Differences between Linux and OpenSolaris exists in licensing as well.

While Linux is released under the GNU Public License (GPL), OpenSolaris is released under Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). CDDL is based on Mozilla Public License (MPL) and unlike GPL, which is a project based license, CDDL is a file based license. This allows users and developers a greater level of freedom and permits both closed source as well as open source components to co-exist in the same project.

OpenSolaris is very different from the operating systems of the Microsoft Windows family. As stated earlier, unlike Windows, OpenSolaris is free and open source. Even though it is possible to run some of the applications developed for Windows using WINE, OpenSolaris and Windows are different in most of the technological aspects.