Jonathan Schwartz had an interview with eWeek in which he talked a little about the open sourcing of Solaris. Although nothing definitive was said about what that really means, he did give a timeline of "up to nine months". There was a lot of talk about what open sourcing something means.

Excerpt

We are overburdening the words "open source." There's a spectrum of licenses that apply to a variety of different contexts and applications. So you can't just ask if it is open source or not because the source code to Java is available; the bug database is available. But Java restricts you from mucking with the core concept of compatibility.

So what are your license plans for the open-sourcing of Solaris?

There are several licenses that may be appropriate in the open-sourcing of Solaris. While this is still a topic of debate inside of Sun, what is no longer under debate is whether we will open-source Solaris, which was a source of debate for a while. But what happened in Linux has really proven to us that having more code available to the community just brings more developers and customers.

That about those open-source licenses currently available? Will they meet those goals?

The debate in Sun is now about the community model and the government model that you use to manage its evolution. The license is really a derivative of that conversation because if you pick the GPL [GNU General Public License], you end up with one set of issues and artifacts that arise, while if you pick the BSD, you come up with another issue.

Read more in: Sun's Schwartz Opens Up on Solaris Plan

We are going to develop an X86 port of Solaris

Our customer don’t care about Solaris on the X86 so we are discontinuing it.

We are developing our own Linux distribution for the X86 market

Due to popular demand we have brought back Solaris on the X86

Our customer’s don’t care about Linux on the x86 so we are discontinuing it.

Due to popular demand we have revived Linux on the X86

We will offer Sun Desktop on Linux, but we have no “Linux” strategy and will eventually provide it on Solaris

We will open source Solaris

Our customers don’t care about open sourcing Solaris. Not a single customer has asked us to open source Solaris

We will open source Java

We will open source Solaris per say, but we will look into provide an open process such as the Java Community Process; we still need to work out the details, call us back in 9 months for more details.

Our customers don’t care about open sourcing java, this is all a creation of the vast right wing conspiracy headed by IBM because they envy us so much, therefore we will not be open sourcing Java.

Linux/Optreon with Cache RAID (like LSI), or NewISys 4300 which is what the big guys OEM.
.V

I come to ServerSide.Com for Java related topics. For OS related discussions I go somewhere else.

Bibin. Haven't been able to contact you via the info I had available. Can you send me an email to: ken.coman@maryland-merchant.com Want to talk with you about Siebel related subject matter.

Thanks

Ken Coman

(forum: Please forgive this post - need to contact an old friend - and this is the only way I know where to find him)