"Open" Solaris not open enough, watchers say

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Dec. 13, 2004

Developers will spurn Open Solaris, warns eWEEK's Steven Vaughan-Nichols, if it is licensed under the "Common Development and Distribution License" (CDDL) that Sun sent to the OSI last week for consideration. Even if the OSI deems the CDDL an open source license, GPL incompatibility would hamstring Open Solaris, Vaughan-Nichols says.

Compatibility with the GPL is not a pre-condition for acceptance as an open source license. The OSI is expected to announce in the weeks ahead whether the CDDL meets the Open Source Definition.

In today's article, entitled, "Sun thumbs nose at the GPL," Vaughan-Nichols explains why, as a derivative of the Mozilla Public License, the CDDL is not compatible with the GPL, and why incompatibility with the GPL would limit the popularity of Open Solaris.

Vaughan-Nichols quotes Linus Torvalds likening the license to "a moat against the barbarians at the gate," and quotes an executive at competitor HP comparing Sun's move to a woman announcing she's half-pregnant.

Sun announced in September that it would release a version of Solaris under an open source license, and that it would build an application binary interface (ABI) that would enable Linux programs to run unmodified on Open Solaris. Then, in December, the company submitted the CDDL to the OSI for consideration, saying that none of the 50 existing open source licenses suited its purposes.

Sun's Solaris operating system has lost market share in the telecommunications industry in recent years to systems from HP and others running Carrier Grade Linux. Sun announced in September that it will offer a CGL-based product. Sun was earlier rumored to be in acquisition talks with embedded Linux provider MontaVista, which MontaVista subsequently denied.

Read the full eWEEK story for additional colorful quotes and analysis.

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