Jonathan Schwartz, Sun"s chief operating officer and president, on Tuesday presented a spirited defense of his company"s decision to use the Common Development and Distribution License for its OpenSolaris project rather than the GNU GPL, under which the Linux operating system is licensed.
Giving the opening keynote address at the second annual OSBC (Open Source Business Conference) here, Schwartz also touted the company"s recent controversial Solaris patent grant, saying that making those 1,600 patents available would help lower the barrier to entry for software development and would benefit open source. In defense of the CDDL, Schwartz said that "free software does not imply you no longer believe in intellectual property, it means you no longer believe in charging for your IP."