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And with that release will come access to 1,600 patents contained in the software.

'As the largest business contributor to the open source community, Sun has always been an ardent believer in open standards and the open source process going back to the inception of this company,' said Scott McNealy, Chairman and CEO, Sun Microsystems. 'The release of more than 1,600 patents associated with the Solaris OS far eclipses any other vendor's contribution. Today represents a huge milestone for Sun, for the community, for developers and for customers.'

But there are caveats: these patents will only be free to license for use by developers building products distributed under Sun's Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

The CDDL is based on the Mozilla Public Licence, and neither are compatible with the GNU General Public Licence under which Linux-based operating systems are made available.

This rather puts into perspective Sun's claimed goal of making these patents available 'to help facilitate innovation and help users get new open source products and technologies to market faster without having to obtain patent licenses from Sun'.

The main objective for Sun has to be to foster a developer community around the

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platform - after all, it couldn't be considered a successful gamble if all that intellectual property was given away without an explosion in progress or sales or both.

Indeed patent researcher Greg Aharonian wonders whether Sun might leave itself open to a shareholder lawsuit if the move doesn't bear fruit, given the amount of R&D funds ploughed into developing Solaris to date.

'These patent donations have little to do with helping the open source community with its IP problems ... but rather are mostly due to gamesmanship between the big computing companies.'

By denying Linux developers from accessing the patent portfolio with its CDDL licence, Sun has blocked out a great part of the revenue-generating open source companies from benefitting from patent access. Aharonian suggests that those that do stand to benefit would probably be companies that generate too little income to licence from Sun in any case - thus minimising Sun's risk.

Aharonian says that Sun's donation of 1,600 patents, and IBM's recent donation of 500, to the open source community are a drop in an ocean of some 200,000 software patents granted in the US. Nor do they remove the risk of litigation from patent holders - much of which comes from patent specialists rather than IT companies.

'My wariness about the value of these donations is that the companies making the donations are doing nothing to help improve issued patent quality, which would lead to fewer software patents being issued that might affect those open source companies actually making money, while diminishing the need for these semi-patent releases,' he says.

And Sun's move will do little to appease many open source developers, who are against software patents in the first place.

Solaris 10 will be available under the CDDL in the second quarter of this year.