OSNews

Many open source projects are typically not the owners of copyrights of contributions to them, such as the Linux kernel. In the case of Apache and FSF projects, they are two non-profit organisations with many vested interests in them. Sun is a for-profit company with a large amount of proprietary and closed software you would effectively be contributing to, for nothing.

Keep in mind also that Sun holds copyright (albeit jointly) over all of the OpenSolaris codebase as a result. Individuals only hold it over their contributions. This means that if Sun does relicense, as they are can certainly do, then without the rest of the code (and the closed parts) your contribution will likely become absolutely meaningless to you or anyone else.

This is all true, and I think anyone currently going in to the relationship with Sun on this knows it up front and are doing it with there eyes open.

I just want to clarify, though, that the contributors doing so are doing of their free will because of their desire to work with Sun and Solaris, not because anything in the actual license on the code is forcing them too. It's an attribute of the current community around the OpenSolaris source base, not the source base itself.

If IBM wanted to really play with Sun, they'd fork OpenSolaris and start fixing bugs in a community that does not require shared copyright (or if it does, it goes to a non-profit foundation or whatever). EclipseOS, for lack of a better word.

It would be a waste of time, pety, and spiteful, but still a very annoying thorn in Suns side if IBM were able to build its own, distinct OpenSolaris community outside of what Sun is doing, particularly since the new community could easily take CDDL'd patches and changes from the current OpenSolaris community, but the OpenSolaris community could not easily incorporate changes back.