Open Source Solaris staggered

ALTHOUGH SUN is planning to show off Solaris 10 next week, there are signs that it will take a while for the open source version to hit the shops.

Glenn Weinberg, vice president of the Operating Platforms Group at Sun, told internetnews.com, here, that it could be months before an open source Solaris 10 is available.

He said that the company's goal is not to "dribble it out" or release a "half-baked" OS. The current road map is that Solaris 10 won't officially be available until the end of the year and the open source version will not be around for "several months" after that.

Sun has been promising to open the Solaris source code since the beginning of the year. It is seen as a way to commoditise the operating system and foster third-party developers.

According to Weinberg, the project has hit a few snags as Sun apparently does not own all the intellectual property rights to Solaris. It has to sort out a few of these issues with the third party developers who have the rights to bits of the code. Apparently some of them do not want to expose their parts of the code to the open source movement. µ