But this has now been shot down by the community advisory board (governing board) of the OpenSolaris project which has recommended that OpenSolaris stay under its existing licence, the Common Development and Distribution License, and not be dual-licensed. OpenSolaris is the project under which Sun released a subset of the source code for its Solaris operating system.

The starchy nature of the project is seen in the language used in this determination: "GPL licensing OpenSolaris would be yielding to a small vocal minority of FOSS developers who use the lack of GPL licensing, purely as a means of fostering FUD towards OpenSolaris and who will, in all likelyhood (sic), find some other workable mechanism to continue to foster FUD towards the project."

In a way, this decision underlines Sun's approach to free and open source software, something which one could characterise as trying to be half-pregnant. Sun's flirtation with open source has been going on for a while, born mainly out of desperation. It is not the only company which has seen Linux or other free and open source applications bite into its lunch - Novell and Oracle are two other well-known tech outfits which come to mind. But every time Sun has just dipped a toe in the water and then pulled back.

One road which Sun traversed was in 2004; the company put out a GNU/Linux distribution but called it the Java Desktop System, in order to capitalise on its best known brand, Java. The nomenclature made little sense. JDS was based on SUSE Linux. To be true, it was a conservative distribution but then it was meant for suits. By May 2006, the JDS was being shipped as a desktop environment for Solaris. Support for Linux had been shelved. The toe had been pulled out of the water.

In January 2005, Sun kicked off the OpenSolaris project. Of itself, the project says: "Initially, the OpenSolaris project will provide the core kernel, libraries and commands that are currently distributed with the Solaris OS. Over time, it is expected that additional parts of the Solaris OS will be made available through the project."