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But I believe that Sun's ultimate motivation for dual-licensing with the GPLv3 was to gain street cred and attract developers for its alternate FOSS universe. They realized that since the CDDL is so permissive (from the developer's point of view), the GPLv3 doesn't really change anything. It doesn't impose strong copyleft (link definition) because the CDDL permits weak copyleft (file definition).

Which I think is a point that's lost on many in the recent Sun-love-in over the idea they'll use GPL v3.

At the end of the day it's a hollow move; any contributions from the free-side of the community to openSolaris will have to be dual licensed under GPLv3/CDDL, and in fact will have to attribute copyright to Sun who will reserve the right to relicense at will.

The only way solaris will become a viable kernel for those espousing the 4-freedoms is for the community to immediately fork it into a v3-only licensed version, which will be interesting to watch.

So no matter how much the stubbornness of the linux kernel devs irks the FL segment of the FLOSS camp, the linux kernel will likely still remain the most viable kernel for their intentions of a truly free OS.

As soon as Linus made it clear that Linux was staying GPLv2, Sun could go ahead with its master plan: to create an alternate free software community protected from Linux by a legal barrier, aka GPLv3.

Bingo. Sun has nothing to lose with selecting v3, so why not? With v2 they would have ran too great a risk of merging and co-mingling code with linux. Sun is using the community to earn cred as an OSS player, and the FSF is using Sun to earn cred for v3. But nobody is really gaining anything other than hype.

Of course, having said all that, I still applaud Sun's move; I just don't think it's the paradigm shift for the FLOSS community that many are making it out to be.