Sun Details Open Solaris Licensing Plans - ' Accelerated Release ' (
Page 2 of 2 )
Sun has moved up its release plans for Solaris 10, which will be available Jan. 31 as a free download from Sun.com. Sun will begin preinstalling Solaris on Sun systems in February and is working to do the same with its OEMs.
On the community front, Goguen said Sun already has an initial Open Solaris community of more than 100 people, from inside and outside the company, which it plans to expand. The company was also setting up an interim advisory council to establish the rules for community governance.
This council would comprise two people from inside Sun, two from the Open Solaris community and one from the greater open-source community. The current Open Solaris community would decide who filled those two slots, Goguen said.
"But Solaris development today is not controlled by a single person. We have a thousand or so developers inside Sun who work on it as a community. So, the goal with Open Solaris is to have Suns developers continue to contribute to Open Solaris, while ensuring that the community has a lot of input into what shows up in the open distribution," he said.
But Sun will decide what goes into its branded Solaris, which will likely be a subset of what is in the open version, he said.
However, many in the Linux and open-source community are unhappy with the use of the CDDL, as it is not compatible with the GPL (GNU General Public License). In fact, Claire Giordano, a member of Suns CDDL team, said as much in a letter accompanying the submission.
"Like the Mozilla Public License, the CDDL is not expected to be compatible with the GPL, since it contains requirements that are not in the GPL. Thus, it is likely that files released under the CDDL will not be able to be combined with files released under the GPL to create a larger program," she said.
Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds also weighed in, saying he believes that, from Suns perspective, the CDDL had to be incompatible with the GPL. Sun "wants to keep a moat against the barbarians at the gate," he told eWEEK.
Torvalds also said he does not expect to see developers clamoring to start playing with that source code. "Nobody wants to play with a crippled version [of Solaris]. I, obviously, do believe that theyll have a hard time getting much of a community built up," he said.
Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest open-source news, reviews and analysis.
Linux, Open Source & Ubuntu News & Reviews 
