Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Sun ponders Solaris GPL

January 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Sun ponders Solaris GPL

TAGS: Platforms

Sun Microsystems continues to ponder offering its OpenSolaris OS under the GNU General Public License but no decision has yet been made, the company said in a statement released on Tuesday.

"While we are not ruling out the possibility that we could add GPL to OpenSolaris at some point, we have no announcement to make about that today. We maintain that the world needs more than one type of open source license and we believe CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) is the most polished and complete version of the Mozilla family of licenses, which is one reason we kept CDDL for Java EE and added GPL v2, as well," the company said.

"While we are actively engaged with the FSF [Free Software Foundation] regarding the details for GPL v3, our decision has not been made and we are continuing to evaluate the situation," Sun said.

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.

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.

Posted by Paul Krill on January 16, 2007 12:46 PM

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