Sun makes its move.

Sun makes its move.

So Sun is fighting fire with fire. Don't get distracted by the fire and
loose sight of the reason behind it.

Sun wants to stop IBM and HP from using Linux to eat Solaris market share.
They're opening the Solaris source because closed source Solaris can't
compete with Linux. Not because they want the open source community to
improve Solaris. If they just wanted to improve Solaris and give it
access to a larger code base and developer pool, they'd GPL or BSD it.
(They know what the GPL is since they used it for OpenOffice, and they've
known what BSD is from day 1.)

The whole point of coming up with a new license is so that Linux can't use
any of the Solaris code. They knew they had to get OSI approval because
their previous "community license" attempts at source-under-glass were so
resoundingly ignored (at least once the laughter had died down). They
_still_ want "source under glass", thus the incompatibility of this
license with any other license, especially the Linux license. This is as
close to what they really want as they could get away with.

The patent thing is also aimed at Linux. "Look, we have patents too, and
we can sue Linux with 'em any time we want!" Of course it's FUD, a little
bit of implied saber rattling they're _highly_ unlikely to follow through
on if they don't want to wind up somewhere between SCO and Unisys in the
eyes of the community, which includes not just their own customer base but
a largeish chunk of the Fortune 500 with patent portfolios of their own.
(The first rule of any Mutually Assured Destruction strategy is that he
who strikes first will be made an example of.)

Maybe their new open source initiative will help Solaris sell a few more
seats by allowing IT purchasing decision makers to tick off a check box.
And maybe it'll sponge up some open source coding manhours that would
otherwise have been spent working on Linux. But neither effect is
particularly interesting, or of much long-term significance.

MacOS X is based on "yet another BSD fork" Darwin, which is open source
and which a rapidly growing highly innovative multi-billion dollar company
is layering quite impressive proprietary code on top of. Hands up anybody
in the Linux world who loses any sleep over this. Sun can only DREAM of
Solaris becoming as relevant as MacOS X...