by Mike Ricciuti
May 4, 2008 9:02 PM PDT

Sun Microsystems on Monday said it has released OpenSolaris, an open source version of its Solaris operating system, and announced a deal with Amazon.com. The OpenSolaris project has been under development for more than three years. Sun hopes to popularize the operating system with developers, students and other traditional Linux users.

n addition, Sun said it has partnered with Amazon.com to release OpenSolaris as an on-demand service as part of Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). OpenSolaris will be available for operating system and storage services as part of the overall EC2 service, which starts at 10 cents per CPU-hour, the company said. Sun touts OpenSolaris as the most robust Unix-flavored operating system.

OpenSolaris will offer some interesting features intended to appeal to the curious, such as the ability to run the operating system from CD and a system for easily rolling-back installations.