Sun organised their CommunityOne event today, and took the opportunity to also release a new version of OpenSolaris, after three years of development. Although things are not very clear (there's an announcement of the new release on sun.com, a new website on opensolaris.com, but no mention of this release on opensolaris.org!), this should be the result of Project Indiana lead by Ian Murdoch, founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Will this make forget all passed difficulties?

Netbeans also saw a new release with version 6.1, providing faster startup times, support for the Spring web framework, tighter Mysql integration and further ruby/JRuby enhancements.

Virtualbox, also acquired by Sun recently, had a release last week.

Microsoft announced that System Center will support the Linux distributions from RedHat and Suse. The solution is based on Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, where Microsoft will join the Steering comitee, and contribute code under the Microsoft Public License (OSI approved)

The Nexenta Operating System "is a free and open source operating system combining the OpenSolaris kernel with GNU application userland. NexentaCore is a minimal (core) foundation that can be used to quickly build servers, desktops, and custom distributions tailored for specialized applications. It is already used as the foundation for NexentaStor storage appliance."

It tries to bring the Ubuntu and Debian experience to OpenSolaris. In fact, the Nexenta Operating Sytem even wants to become the official port of Debian/GNU to the OpenSolaris Core.

This 1.0 release will be used as foundation for further Nexenta OS development.

IBM has announced that it extends it support of the Solaris operating system on it x86 and blades systems. This further extends an existing agreement between the two companies, as Solaris was already available on select IBM systems.

As a reminder, Sun has published OpenSolaris under an Open Source license, but even Sun employees admit it's not very easy to get a good understanding of the OpenSolaris project. Work is in progress though to changes this under the name Project Indiana, with a very active mailing list open to all interested.