When Sun Microsystems promised to make it's Solaris source code freely available to developers - it meant it. Their Open Solaris project releases a very generous 10 million lines of Solaris 10 code to the open source community.

The company hopes this move gains support from developers. They have lost a large amount of business over the past few years to companies like Hewlett-Packard and Dell who offer the free Linux operating system on their cheaper systems.

Sun CEO and chairman Scott McNealy said, "With the Open Solaris project, I think it's correct to say that Sun is the number-one donor of lines of code of any organization worldwide. Solaris 10 is the number-one operating system on the planet at this time in terms of features and choice of platforms, including Intel and AMD on 32-bit and 64-bit, and it is available for free with a right-to-use contract"