Franz Haberhauer's Weblog Franz Haberhauer's Weblog

Sun has made the next step with OpenSolaris. We have announced the licensing, we have released the first piece of code: the source code for DTrace, one of the key innovations in Solaris 10, and we have disclosed the roadmap for OpenSolaris. Users in a pilot program do already have access to the full buildable source and actually have already built OpenSolaris from it, e.g. Pieter Van den Abeele or Jörg Schilling. Ben Rockwood, another member of the OpenSolaris pilot program and the supposedly the first who built OpenSolaris externally, maintains an extensive blog. A whole list of bloggers on OpenSolaris may be found here.

We went with the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), an OSI approved open source license, which evolved from the Mozilla Public License (MPL). In 1999 David Wallace Croft compared the GPL and the MPL and elaborated why from his perspectives the MPL is actually the more free license as it does not have the "viral" nature of the GPL and allows more business models.

Update: For a current discussion of aspects of the CDDL versus GPL see Pamela Jones' comments at Groklaw and Simon Phipps' response

The first piece of code which is featured on www.opensolaris.org are the sources for DTrace. Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal from the DTrace development team provide quite a bit of background information in their blogs.

Within the first 24 hours more than 50.000 unique visitors viewed www.opensolaris.org and there have been more than 1.500 downloads of the DTrace sources in the first 12 hours. Pretty impressive. Jim Grisanzio, Sun's Community Manager OpenSolaris, has collected a lot of feedback on the OpenSolaris launch.