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The company last month released version 10 of its flagship Unix operating system with the promise that it would make it available under an Open Source licence.

While there are a plethora of similar possible licences to choose from, the company has decided that none quite meet its requirements and has come up with a licence of its own - based on that used by the Mozilla Foundation - and submitted it to the Open Source Initiative for acceptance.

Sun is calling its new licence the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Like Mozilla's MPL, it is not expected to be compatible with the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) as it doesn't contain the provisions around patents that requires they

The CDDL uses the MPL's 'patent peace' provisions which only expects that contributors license patents to the extent that it allows the use of that code.

Ultimately this may help to maintain a glass wall between Solaris and its GPL-protected Linux-based rival operating systems. While Sun may want the benefits of thousands of developers pushing the progress of Solaris, it doesn't want all its prior investment in the platform shipped wholesale and freely into rival Linux.

One potentially problematic area may be that the CDDL does away with distinctions between commercial and non-commercial uses, but still requires that any software binaries derived from both CDDL code and code issued under another Open Source license must meet the terms of both licences. So such software will still be restricted to commercial and non-commercial restrictions.

Sun said it was loathe to create yet another Open Source licence, and it has yet to be accepted as such, and it has also yet to decide whether to license Solaris under the CDDL at all. But it claims to have worked hard at making the CDDL easy to use in conjunction with other Open Source licences.

The OSI has yet to comment on what it thinks of Sun's efforts.