'Simon Phipps (Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at the time), who had introduced Ms. Cooper as "the one who actually wrote the CDDL",[19] did not immediately comment, but later in the same video, he says, referring back to the license issue, "I actually disagree with Danese to some degree",[20] while describing the strong preference among the engineers who wrote the code for a BSD-like license, which was in conflict with Sun's preference for something copyleft, and that waiting for legal clearance to release some parts of the code under the then unreleased GNU GPL v3 would have taken several years, and would probably also have involved massed resignations from engineers (unhappy with either the delay, the GPL, or both—this is not clear from the video).'
This implies to me that the attitude among employees at Sun was that a BSD-style license was *preferred*, and licensing under the *GPL* was the thing that would (potentially) have brought about a mass exodus of unhappy engineers. That is, it seems to be the inverse of what Joerg is suggesting.
But I think two things are being conflated: Solaris 2.0 was open-sourced over a period of several years starting in the mid-2000s, and extending through the end of the decade (2008, I guess). But your earlier proposal for SunOS 4 (retroactively renamed Solaris 1.x...) dates from 1993, more than a decade prior. It was my sense in the early 90s that licenses weren't given nearly as much thought or consideration by individual engineers as they are now. While I wasn't there, I imagine that at the time, folks were probably more of the attitude, "open up SunOS? Yeah, that'd be cool...License? Uh, I think my buddy from Berkeley has something about this...." Anyway, I don't think one can directly compare the two because a *lot* changed in that decade in between.
- Dan C.