Sun’s mule train has finally pulled into Indiana after three years on the road.

Indiana is the Linux-friendly Fedora-like OpenSolaris project meant to move the Solaris-shy Linux community off Linux and on to Solaris tempted by Solaris widgetry like the highly scalable, rollback-easy, 128-bit ZFS default filesystem, Linux-like network-based Image Packaging System (IPS) application install accelerator, DTrace predictive self-healing and scalable Containers virtualization, not to mention its Gnome 2.22 front-end and built-in Firefox browser.

The OS, covering desktop, server and HPC in a single distribution, is now officially out and available to all comers as a free download from Sun or on the Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform, where it’s in invitation-only beta. Sun is offering free technical support. Amazon charges 10 cents a CPU-hour for EC2. (See www.sun.com/amazon.)

Sun, unprofitable again and looking at another layoff, is trying to encourage program development so it can sell more hardware and services. Conversely, Solaris’ bigger application portfolio makes it attractive.

Sun will support the so-called OpenSolaris 2008.5 for $49 an incident for developers up to $2,160 a system a year for customized configurations, prices Sun says are competitive with Red Hat.

Sun is also supporting MySQL on Linux and EC2 in the price of premium MySQL Enterprise subscription. And Zmanda, Thoughtworks, GigaSpaces and RightScale are supporting the EC2 push.

From here on out OpenSolaris, licensed under Sun’s Community development and Distribution (CDDL) license, is supposed to be upgraded every six months. Unlike the GPL, CDDL (say cuddle) allows mixing open source and proprietary code but can’t be used with GPL widgetry, obviously a problem in the open source world.

Sun claims 100,000 registered members of OpenSolaris.org. AMD and Intel are working with OpenSolaris to make sure things executes.