Sun to open source Solaris this month

Licence hurdles out of the way, says Schwartz

Tom Sanders in California, vnunet.com 20 Jan 2005

Sun Microsystems is ready to open up the source code for Solaris, vnunet.com has learnt.

In an exclusive interview with vnunet.com, Sun's chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz said that he expects the Solaris source code to be released "hopefully by the end of this month".

Sun has previously disclosed that it wants to open source the operating system, but has been delaying the actual release because it could not find the proper licence. By releasing the code, the company aims to regain some of the ground lost to Linux in recent years.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved Sun's Community Development and Distribution Licence on Tuesday, giving it the status of an official open source licence.

"The fact that the OSI approved the licence gives us carte blanche to leverage that or the BSD licence or the General Public Licence [GPL] in the release of Solaris," said Schwartz.

The issue with finding the proper licence, according to Schwartz, is that "when you pick a licence, you're basically picking a lifestyle for the community of people you expect to evolve around your product".

Enterprise users like to have a say about the direction the development of the operating system is taking, said Schwartz. But he argued that some licences, such as the GPL, require them to provide too many details about the services that they will ultimately deploy.

"There is no licence for all constituencies. We want to make sure that we are representing the broadest community possible," said Schwartz.

Sun had not previously talked about the licence it wanted to pick for open sourcing the operating system.

"This is the clearest note that [Sun is] making progress in open source Solaris that I've seen so far," said Gary Hein, vice president and service director for application platform strategies with analyst firm Burton Group.

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