McNealy says Sun evaluating OpenSolaris on GPL

Sun is evaluating whether it should release OpenSolaris under the GNU GPL (general public license), company co-founder and chairman Scott McNealy told reporters in Bangalore on a conference call Wednesday.

OpenSolaris, the open-source version of Sun's Solaris operating system, has so far been open sourced by Sun under the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License), which is also approved by the Open Source Initiative.

"There are good arguments for both, and we might do both [GPL and CDDL]," McNealy said. "There are some folks who actually prefer CDDL over GPL." CDDL allows a country like India to develop its own intellectual property, protect it, and generate revenue from it, he added.

The conference call with Indian reporters comes ahead of McNealy's visit next week to India, which together with China are the fastest growing markets for Sun. Sun also has a development center in India.

"I would hardly say the world has adopted open source yet," McNealy said. The challenge is in getting the message out, he added. Sun's own open-source pitch has not been heard around the world, according to McNealy. That is why he is traveling to India and other countries to get the message out, he said.

There have been nearly 8 million downloads of Solaris in the last two years, and there are 900 systems certified to run Solaris, which is more than any Linux distribution, McNealy said.