Sun said Tuesday it expects Solaris 10 code to be finished by the end of the year, though executives told CRN last week that the Unix operating system upgrade is expected to be available on UltraSPARC servers beginning in January and on x86 and AMD Opteron servers shortly thereafter.
Though it seems improbable that Sun would release all of the Solaris intellectual property to the open source community, Schwartz reiterated previous company rhetoric that there will be a nominal difference between the proprietary version of Solaris 10 and what Sun will open source.
Rather than keep some of the Solaris IP for itself, "Our approach is actually to do quite the opposite," Schwartz said. "[We want] to ensure that everything in Solaris that we built -- everything -- is available and open sourced to the community."
Glenn Weinberg, vice president of operating environments at Sun, stressed that some technology in Solaris is owned by third parties, and the Santa Clara, Calif., vendor cannot open source those components if it does not have permission.
"There are limitations to what we can do [because] we don't own all the IP rights to Solaris," Weinberg said. "There are things we have from third parties [that] we don't have rights to yet, or third parties don't want us to expose source code."
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