Once based on BSD, then on AT&T System V release 4, the operating system developed initially by Sun has undergone several evolutions during its life.
While the technical innovations of Solaris played (and still play) a major role in the shaping of the modern IT world, from a project governance perspective the most important event of the Solaris history has probably occurred in the 2005-2010 period. During those years, Sun open-sourced the code of the upcoming Solaris 10. Even if the OpenSolaris project was rapidly canceled by Oracle after it acquired Sun Microsystems, the genie was already out of the bottle.
Thanks to the Sun decision and the vibrant community of users and developers build around OpenSolaris, Solaris is still alive today. Especially through open-source projects like illumos, Open Indiana or OmniOSce.
Don’t hesitate to download this infographic to learn more about the history of Solaris. And who knows: maybe that could be a great occasion for you to try one or the other illumos-based distribution and to discover Solaris was the operating system you were looking for!