Sun moots GPL licence for Solaris
Tuesday, 4 May 2004 16:00 EST
Sun Microsystems is considering offering a free, open-source version of its flagship operating system, Solaris, and offering the system with a version of its Java Desktop System, said president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz. Schwartz described a number of initiatives in the works intended to make Solaris more competitive with Linux, which has been taking market share from the low end of Sun's product line. Until now, Sun has made Solaris freely available to certain non-commercial users, but it has not released the Solaris source code, and still charges $99 for a single-processor licence.
Schwartz said there was "not a lot" preventing Sun from releasing Solaris under the General Public Licence. It would offer support contracts as an option, in a model similar to that of Red Hat.
"We view the GPL as a friend. Remember, Sun was built off of BSD and the BSD licence," he said, referring to the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution licence.
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