"Why do all open-source communities have to look the same?" Hahn said. "I would rather have 1,000 developers working together than 12 different Solaris distributions."

Also, one of the major holdups -- the drawn-out process of creating a constitution for governing the OpenSolaris community -- is close to being resolved, according to Rich Teer, a member of OpenSolaris.org's current governing body. Teer says a constitution, modeled upon the Apache Software Foundation's meritocratic model, should be approved before the end of the year.

"The thing with Linux is that it is a benevolent dictatorship, with one person having the ultimate yea or nay," Teer said. "That is certainly not the case with Apache, nor will it be with OpenSolaris."

While OpenSolaris.org will legally remain a part of Sun, its government will eventually become "as independent as possible," according to Teer, who added that the company will eventually be "no different than any other member of OpenSolaris."

A number of companies are already benefiting from Sun's open-sourcing of Solaris.