Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz states in a recent blog posting that Sun "didn't own all the IP within Solaris to predetermine a singular license for every contributor," in response to questions he receives about the possibility of Sun releasing a version of the operating system under the open-source GPL. Solaris, a member of the long Unix-based family line, has been a staple of Sun's computing philosophy for at least a decade.

Schwartz also said that "too many of our customers - especially those embedding Solaris - preferred a files based license."

He also noted in his blog that he attended the OSCOn conference in Portland, Oregon recently, where he listened to a speech by the OSDL's Andrew Morton. He described Morton's presentation as "low energy" and took exception to Morton's apparent view that operating systems are "commodities" and that commodities are "no longer of value."

Schwartz also wrote that Morton "took a couple of obligatory potshots at Sun," stating that Morton said the company "should just give up on Solaris." Schwartz noted that Solaris now has 2 million licensees, and that he later met with OSDL executives to "engage them...in partnering to drive the adoption of Open Solaris."

Schwartz notes that he also listened to a presentation by Jeremy Zawodny about the use of open source at Yahoo and was struck by what he termed the "dichotomy...between (Yahoo's) usage of open source software vs. the creation of proprietary products and services like FlickR and Yahoo Messenger."

            
Jonathan                      Andrew Morton
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