Many news accounts treated the Google/Sun press conference a couple of weeks ago as a damp squib, maybe an act of magnanimity by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the cool new kid in the school, to help out his nerdy former employer. What can Sun do for Google? was the question.

Here is a suggestion, based on no specific information whatsoever.

Google is a proud user of Linux, which operates its far-flung server farms. But it is unlikely that Google runs an off-the-shelf version of Linux; it must be tweaking it substantially to meet Google's particular needs. And these tweaks must be related to Google's basic search engine technologies -- the crown jewels of the company's $90-billion-market-cap empire.

Under the General Public License (GPL) that controls Linux, Google can legitimately add all the tweaks it wants and keep them secret. The obligation to disclose modifications to Linux to the world at large arises only if the modified version is distributed to others. So Google can tweak and shut up to its heart's content.

To the open source community, the lack of any obligation to dislose tweaks unless the software is further distributed is a loophole in the GPL. Their logic, which is hard to refute within the parameters of their belief system, is that the community depends on giving as well as taking, and that to use Linux as your platform without disclosing your improvements is a violation of the spirit of community.

The GPL is currently undergoing a revision. Details are sparse, but one issue is that of "web services," which means how to deal with those who make a Linux a foundation of their service business, but do not disclose the modifications they make in the software. It may well be that GPL 3.0 will mandate some disclosures.

If this happens, it would not affect the use of Linux as it exists today, but it would create issues (to be euphemistic) for Google and other services companies that now rely on Linux. They would not be able to incorporate future changes in Linux without disclosing their own code.

One option for Google would be to change operating systems to something more congruent with Google's business needs, and Sun Solaris could be the ticket. The Solaris license is open source, but far more malleable than the GPL - Sun wants to encourage commercial development on top of Solaris.

Such a shift would be aided by the fact that Linux and Solaris are part of the same genetic family. Both derived from Unix, and much Linux code came specifically from the BSD version of Unix developed by Bill Joy and then adapted for Solaris. Indeed, rumor has it that much Solaris code was put into Linux by Sun software engineers.

So who knows? There could be more here for Google than meets the eye. And it could also be that Sun sees the impending revision of the GPL as a general business opportunity. Never forget that Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen, who control the revision process, regard proprietary software as an evil, to be eradicated from the earth. This theology applies to the web services companies as well as to software peddlers.