[wellylug] Finally... OpenSolaris is on it's way

[Rob Giltrap]

<quote>

"With the announcement of the Open Source Initiative-approved Common 
Development and Distribution License (CDDL) for OpenSolaris, Sun is 
kicking off a wave of source-code licensing and community-building that 
stands to benefit Solaris OS - the world's most advanced operating 
system - for developers, businesses, and their customers.

The OpenSolaris program is Sun's contribution of Solaris OS with 
millions of development hours worth of code to the community. Sun is 
making Solaris dynamic tracing (DTrace) source code immediately available.

Sun also announced that it will grant access to more than 1,600 of its 
patents under the CDDL for the OpenSolaris program. Today's grant marks 
the largest single release of patent innovations into the open source 
community by any organization to date."

<snip>

"The OpenSolaris program plans to include a community board of advisors 
to oversee the project. Expected to be finalized by March, the board 
would initially consist of five members: two appointed by Sun, two 
nominated by and elected from the OpenSolaris pilot program, and one to 
be selected from the broader open source community. Sun expects the 
board to grow over time to meet the needs of the community.

Sun plans to have full, buildable Solaris OS source code available at 
OpenSolaris.org in Q2 2005."

</quote>

Ref: http://www.opensolaris.org

Short of a bit of code scrubbing (i.e. checking that Sun has copyright 
for every line of code and is therefore legally allowed to release/gift 
it) OpenSolaris is finally on it's way with no more road blocks. Of 
course OpenSolaris still has the same issues as Linux in that there are 
still plenty of closed source drivers out there which Sun has no control 
over.

Cheers, Rob.