eWeek has posted an article claiming to have a source that states that Sun is set to license OpenSolaris under GPLv3. Granted I’m not particularly knowledgable about licensing matters, this is particularly interesting for a number of reasons. The fanfare regarding the CDDL license and its use in OpenSolaris was a bit much in its day. I don’t believe, however, that technologies such as DTrace would find its way onto OSX without it. We’re also seeing more evidence that ZFS is supported in Leopard.
The choice of license does begin to make sense with this news coming almost 2 years after the initial release of OpenSolaris. It allowed the core source to be released quickly, unencumbered with the restrictions of GPL, while allowing work on things such as device drivers to be available under the new version of GPL to continue. It also seems that Sun have been floating the idea around for quite some time. As Joe states enthusiatically, it’ll lead to a lot of developer mindshare.
I’d love to see what Simon has to say about all of this.