eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Sun Microsystems Inc. will use the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) for its Open Solaris project, and also will announce Tuesday that it is making the source code to its DTrace technology, found in the upcoming Solaris 10 operating system, immediately available to developers.
But the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company plans to keep the Solaris trademark and all distribution rights associated with that, so the Sun Solaris software brand will continue to be made available as a supported distribution by the company, with value-added services and support offered at a charge on top of that.
Sun submitted the CDDL to the OSI (Open Source Initiative) for approval in December, but declined to say what it intended to use the license for. As previously reported in eWEEK, it was widely expected that this would be the license used for the Open Solaris Project if approved.
The OSI approved the license earlier this month, and John Loiacono, Suns executive vice president of software, will officially announce the licenses use for Open Solaris on Tuesday, Tom Goguen, vice president of Suns operating platforms group, told eWEEK.
“Developers will be given access to the source code and will be allowed to modify the code covered by the CDDL, but those modifications will have to be shared back with the community. This is also a very friendly license for OEMs,” Goguen said.
Also, as first reported in eWEEK, developers agreeing to the CDDL will get access to all of the technology rights of more than 1,600 patents associated with Solaris and Open Solaris.
“Its important to note there are also a large number of patents pending in Solaris 10, which could increase this number. The license also gives users a level of patent protection,” Goguen said.
The CDDL, which is based on the commonly used MPL (Mozilla Public License), brings to the table “a lot of the value and benefits of the MPL,” he said.
“We did some tweaking of that license, particularly around how it can be combined with other licenses, and the OSI also took several months taking a close look at it,” he said.
All of the source code to Solaris 10 will be made available not on Tuesday but rather sometime in the second quarter of this year, when developers will be given everything they need to create, build and run an open version of Solaris, Goguen said.
Also on Tuesday, Sun will make the source code available for DTrace, a new feature in Solaris 10 that opens to developers and system administrators a window onto the workings of the operating system and the applications that run on it. The source code will be available at www.opensolaris.org.
However, that code initially will not include the compilers and other files necessary to allow a build to be made from it, as those will be made available later. “But any enterprising developer can take that code and do some interesting things with it,” Goguen said.
There is also some Solaris 10 source code, mostly third-party specifications and drivers, that Sun does not have the legal rights to give away as source code, so these will be made available as binaries and can be built into any open Solaris distribution and used, he said.
Next Page: Accelerated release plans for Solaris 10.
Accelerated Release
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.