Solaris 10 is out, and available for free download. Even bigger news is that while Sun still hasn't released the source code, they have already created a web site for releasing code and released a small part of the code, a component called DTrace. They claim they are planning on getting the rest of the source out by the second quarter of this year.
The license DTrace is released under is called the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) 1.0. Groklaw did an analysis of a propsed version of the license in December. More recently, they expressed some doubts about the patent-licensing in the license. The license seems to be okay, with some problems. It requries source release, so it is more GPL-like than BSD-like. Most notably, it is still - as are many open-source licenses - not GPL-compatible, which will limit the amount of code feedback between the soon-to-be Solaris community and the Linux and GNU community. This is unfortunate, but, I suppose, to be expected.
So in the near future, we will have Linux (or GNU/Linux, whatever), FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris, plus Darwin - which is also a significant part of OS X. That leaves part of OS X and Windows as the only major proprietary OSes. The world is changing. (Of course, Sun can by with this since the are primarily a hardware company, unlike Microsoft, which will probably resist to the end since if Windows becomes free they lose a significant portion of their value. Would that I could convinve them they should shift from a software company to something more generally useful...)
(And, by the way, after having done some reading about it, that DTrace thing sounds kind of cool on its own, though I am not a systems administrator, so what do I know. One sample use of it is a neat little thing called psio that uses DTrace to break down I/O by process so you can see what process is abusing the disks - sort of like top for I/O. Wish I had that on the Mac... I am sure there must be some sort of way to do this without having to use Sun-only tricks, but I don't know what it is.)
