One year ago, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief operating officer, made a promise. It was in June 2004, at a Sun show in Shanghai, that Schwartz said: "Make no mistake, we will open source Solaris."

Today Sun will do just that.

Eric S. Raymond, in an interview at the time, commented: "If [Sun] don't get this done within six months, it's not going to matter at all because Linux is advancing too fast." It remains to be seen from today whether Raymond is right.

The opensolaris.org web site,  the center for OpenSolaris activity, is expected to  have more than 5 million lines of source code posted to it from today according to Sun's Solaris marketing chief, Tom Goguen.

In a sometimes fickle i-technology world, Jonathan Schwartz is a man of his word.

The OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board, created to steward the evolution of the community towards self-governance, has Rich Teer, Al Hopper, Simon Phipps, Casper Dik and Roy Fielding as members. They will be especially proud that from today developers will be able to download the OpenSolaris distribution.

Sun is releasing Solaris under the Community Development and Distribution License, a variant of the Mozilla Public License.