OpenSolaris, the open-source variant of Sun's popular Solaris operating system, has finally exited development with the release today of OpenSolaris 2008.05.

OpenSolaris has been in development for the past three years, and numbers more than 60,000 contributors in it's community, a small fraction of whom are on the payroll at Sun. The distribution is — obviously — based on Solaris, Sun's flagship OS, with the bulk of the code-base comprised of original Solaris code released under the Common Development and Distribution License. Solaris is, in turn originally developed from Unix System V, Release 4 — the system which forms the basis of the litigation between SCO and Novell, which went to trial last week.

Sun added a second feather to their cap via a deal with Amazon to offer OpenSolaris as part of the Elastic Compute Cloud offered through Amazon.com. At the moment, the system is only available to developers by invitation as Amazon works on the infrastructure to offer it on a large scale.