Over three years, the OpenSolaris project has gathered some community under Sun Microsystems Inc. (SMI) guidance. The whole project resides at www.opensolaris.org and is focused on the open flavor of Solaris operating system, licensed under CDDL.

Opera has freed its first open source project, moving code for its Dragonfly debug tool onto the popular BitBucket hosting service. Dragonfly - a website debug tool similar to Mozilla's Firebug - was always intended as an open source project. From its inception in 2008, it carried an open source BSD license. But until this month, the code repository sat on Opera servers.

Hats off to the Project Wonderland developers. Despite Oracle laying them off, the team will continue work on Project Wonderland. According to the project blog the core group behind the 3D virtual world toolkit believes in the open source project enough to keep working on it without backing from Oracle.

Microsoft's Web Sandbox Live Labs project is now available under an open source license. Microsoft chose the Apache 2.0 license for the project, but pointed out that the project will not become an Apache project, although the vendor has been a member of the Apache Software Foundation since July 2008.

"Intel's Open Source Technology Center is pleased to announce the LessWatts.org project, an open source project for saving power on Linux,"

Project DogTag is the culmination of many months of work to prepare the code of Red Hat Certificate System to be open sourced.

If you have coding skills and want to use them to develop open source software you have several options. You can start a new project by yourself or with some friends, or you can join an existing project. The advantage of the former is that you get to make the rules and there is a pretty good (i.e., 100%) chance that your code will be accepted.

It's been nearly three years since Sun Microsystems kicked off its OpenSolaris project by releasing most of the code that comprises its Solaris operating system under an open-source license. And yet, it's only just now, with the release of the first official distribution of OpenSolaris, that the project begins in earnest.

Most software developers have little interest in entrepreneurship, but an open-source software project will survive and thrive only by delivering value into a market (users) with business partners (contributors) and against competitors (other open and closed source software). If you want to run a successful open-source project, it helps if you consider the key questions that apply when defining a commercial business model. I'll expand on Chesbrough's and Rosenbloom's list of 6 themes to demonstrate why.