Sun steps closer to open source licence for Solaris

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 5 Jan 2005 at 17:00

Sun has cleared a major hurdle in its bid to have its own licence accepted as open source.

Last month Sun submitted its Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL) to the Open Source Initiative for approval as it there was no existing open source licence under which it was happy to distribute Solaris.

In an email circular Chairman Russell Nelson announced that the CDDL had been recommended to receive official statement. Although the licence still needs approval from the OSI board, the recommendation is a vote of confidence.

Sun was reluctant to add yet another licence to the multifarious stable available to developers of open source software, and based the CDDL closely on the Mozilla Public licence (MPL). Today's recommendation is the first public evidence of the OSI's position on the CDDL.

Although Sun has not publicly announced its intentions for the CDDL, it is widely believed the company will ship its flagship Solaris operating system using it. The company had previously claimed it intended to ship Solaris 10 as open source in a bid to take on Linux. Sun says that, like the MPL, the CDDL is not compatible with the GNU General Public Licence, under which the Linux kernel is distributed. However, this may be to Sun's advantage, providing a glass wall between the two platforms and preventing Sun's IP tied up in the as-yet proprietary Solaris sliding into Linux.

Unix company SCO, currently in court with IBM with claims that Big Blue did just this, has not commented on Sun's intention to make its Solaris Unix variant, save indicating that Sun has some of the widest rights of all Unix licensees. However, it has indicated it would not allow a wholesale dump of the Unix IP in Solaris into the open source realm.