The official launch comes after previews by thousands of customers as part of the Sun Software Express for Solaris program, during which Sun says more than a half million copies of the product were installed.
Sun CEO Scott McNealy revealed that Solaris 10 represents an investment of 3 000 engineering years and over $500 million in research and development.
Despite the cost, Sun plans to make commercial grade Solaris 10 available for SPARC, x86, AMD64 and EM64T systems as a free download by 31 January.
"Zero cost means zero barrier to entry," explained McNealy. "Revenue will instead be derived from a range of supporting services."
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun COO, underlined the message that Solaris 10 heralds a new era for Sun. "Sun is back with new value and new partners."
Schwartz said there are five operating systems in the market, but only Solaris 10 provided what Sun hopes will be a winning combination of containers, military-grade security, an innovative files system and full support for x86 systems.
Solaris 10 is a vendor-neutral operating system that is supported on more than 270 different hardware platforms from vendors as diverse as Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, IBM and HP.
"Operating systems matter now more than ever," said Schwartz.
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