Sun Microsystems Inc. has proposed a new open-source license to the Open Source Initiative, but Linus Torvalds and others doubt that it will help Sun create an open-source community.

The new Common Development and Distribution License, or CDDL, is based on the MPL (Mozilla Public License 1.1). Although there are more than 50 open-source licenses currently approved by the OSI, Sun said in the proposed license's executive summary that none of them was acceptable.

In the proposal, Sun said that it worked hard to make the CDDL as reusable as possible. "Additionally, we have attempted to address the problems we perceived in existing open-source licenses that led us to conclude that reusing those existing licenses was impractical," the company said in the proposal.