Monday, 22 January 2007

Sun Ponders Solaris GPL

Sun Microsystems still stands undecided on the matter of offering its OpenSolaris OS under the GNU General Public License but no decision has yet been made and the company is still evaluating the situation.

Sun in November announced it was offering up Java to open source via the GPL 2 license. Discussions of Sun offering Solaris via the GPL go back at least as far as 2004. OpenSolaris, the open source version of Solaris, has been available via the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License).

The GPL has carried with it a stipulation that contributions to the software be released to the public at large. With the open sourcing of Java, Sun noted the GPL ‘Classpath exception,’ enabling combinations of proprietary code with GPL Classpath libraries without the need to redistribute the proprietary code.