Sun has announced Solaris has gone open source — or at least bits of it, with the rest following soon. An interesting move, against what must be seen as the threat from Linux.

It’s not, of course, under the GNU licence, oh no, but under something called the Common Development and Distribution Licence, which Sun claims is basically pretty flexible, but without requiring derivative works to also be open source.

If you feel like trying it but don’t want the hassle of the 2.5Gb download, Solaris found its way onto magazine cover DVDs recently, including Australian Personal Computer.