You can think of open solaris relates to solaris as fedora is to red hat Linux. 
It is a test bed for the future releases of solaris. Open Solaris is both x86 
and sparc. 
Last year they were saying that most of a release of open solaris this year 
would become solaris 11. I am not sure if this roadmap will hold given the 
Oracle purchase of sun. 


See 

http://www.opensolaris.com/
and
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/

I was told that one could buy support from sun for a subset of the Open Solaris 
releases. 

len




-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Lloyd Dieter
Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2010 12:50 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] Open Solaris?

I'm not a Solaris type, so I need to ask...is Open Solaris the same as Solaris 
x86?

Trying to find out if the Solaris x86 client will work on Open Solaris, or if 
is something different altogether.

Thanks,

-Lloyd