It's all politics and patents which is playing a major part with regards to open sourcing of Java and Solaris at Sun. One the biggest question being popped is which open source license should be governing the various projects at Sun.

Solaris started off with CDDL whereas Java with GPL v2. Now the company is looking forward to bring both Solaris and Java under GPL v3. Jonathan Schwartz says that a questions making the circles is whether the company would go for GPL for Solaris and they are a lot eager to interact with the BSD, GPL and Mozilla community but the company has not been as effective as it would like to be with regards to the GPL community since a number of people believe that this is the license which they would prefer.

The company wants to opt for GPLv3 since it wants to bring smile on the faces of developers favoring GPL and secondly the latest version of GPL would be offering a patent protection feature. Sun is making all efforts to gel with the open source programming community which is diverse but still very influential.

Solaris under GPLv3 might not do any good in bringing Solaris and Linux together since Linux is under GPLv2 and Linux people are against GPLv3. If Sun uses GPLv3 for Solaris the Linux programmers might not use Solaris and vice versa and as a result Linux might not benefit from performance tools of Solaris and even Solaris might not be able to benefit from the hardware support built into Linux. A wrong move could certainly affect the interests of Sun. A dual licence seems to be an amicable solution since Sun has a copyright to the Solaris codes.