“Sun executives were careful to avoid linking the new Solaris 8
licensing terms to Sun’s maligned Sun Community Source License
(SCSL). Sun had been working for over a year to offer Solaris under
SCSL, but was stymied by the fact that it didn’t own all the
intellectual property inside Solaris. It also was stung by
criticisms from open-source advocates that Sun was attempting to
pass off SCSL as the equivalent of GPL, the Gnu Public License.
SCSL required developers to return bug fixes to Sun, maintain
compatibility, and pay fees to Sun when they ship binaries based on
Sun source code.”
“Instead, on Wednesday, Sun created a new, separate category
to cover Solaris source and binary (a.k.a., runtime) licenses.
These new licenses are just two of a growing number of different
types of software licenses that Sun will offer in the coming
months.“
“On the source side, Sun is making Solaris free to educational,
research, appliance and telco OEMs and interested software vendors.
Source licensors can evaluate, examine and use the code for free,
paying $75 for the media kit and shipping only. But any
modifications made to the Solaris 8 source may be shared with
others, only if they are relayed through Sun.”