Solaris 10 available under OSI's CDDL

BANGALORE: Sun Microsystems, Inc. has announced that the source code for Solaris 10 will be made available under the OSI (Open Source Initiative) approved Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The company has established a community Web site at opensolaris.org. Buildable source code for Solaris will be available at this site in the second quarter of 2005.






In conjunction with the announcement, Sun is also releasing code - under the CDDL - for its Solaris DTrace technology, one of the most popular features of Solaris 10. DTrace source code is immediately available for download from opensolaris.org.





Sun will also establish a Community Advisory Board to help oversee the evolution of OpenSolaris OS technology and the community development efforts. Initially, the advisory board will consist of five members - two will be elected from the OpenSolaris Pilot community, two will be Sun employees, and one member will be selected from the broader open source community. This advisory board will be finalized by March 2005 and will grow and evolve over time to meet the needs of the community.





The CDDL, which was approved by the Open Source Initiative's (OSI) board of directors on January 14, is based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Sun, in partnership with members of the open source community, created a license based upon the MPL that is shorter, clearer, has simplified notice requirements, and contains strong protections against patent litigation. The CDDL was also created to be a reusable license that would be attractive to other open source efforts, so that other projects with similar community and licensing goals would not need to create a new license.