“Sun Microsystems has decided to make publicly available the
source code of one of its crown jewels — the Unix-based Solaris
operating system — under what it calls a “community-source
license,” a company official said Friday.”
“A Sun spokesperson in the company’s U.K. office confirmed the
contents of a report in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, saying that
Sun will allow programmers to download the source code and make any
changes in the Unix-based Solaris as long as bugs are reported back
to the company…”
“Sun, however, may go all the way in the future and make Solaris
available as open-source software, according to the report, which
quoted Greg Papadopoulos, Sun’s chief technology officer, as saying
that Sun only sees an “upside” in making all of the Solaris code
available.”