Sun's proposed licence for its Solaris operating system has been granted official status as an open source licence by the Open Source Initiative

The Open Source Initiative's licence approval committee has given a vote of support to Sun's licence. In late December, the committee recommended that Sun's Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL) be granted official status as an open source licence, Chairman Russell Nelson said in an email posting. The recommendation still must be approved by OSI's board, Nelson added.

Sun submitted the licence, a variant of the Mozilla Public License, in December, then updated it later that month. The licence is likely to be used to govern Sun's Solaris operating system, one of several versions of Unix and a product Sun plans to release as open source software this month. The move is intended to make Sun's Solaris a stronger competitor to Linux and Windows.

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