Yes that was indeed the case, Sun Solaris was losing hard to Linux and they were trying to go the open source route to get back on track (OpenSolaris), however since they (rather obviously) did not want to hand over their key technology advantages like ZFS and DTrace to Linux (their main competitor to which they were losing), they needed to release them under a non-GPLv2 compatible license to prevent Linux inclusion.
They were initially waiting for GPLv3 to be finalized (which would have been fine since Linux is GPLv2 ONLY) but it took too much time so they created CDDL which was, of course GPL incompatible.
They were initially waiting for GPLv3 to be finalized (which would have been fine since Linux is GPLv2 ONLY) but it took too much time so they created CDDL which was, of course GPL incompatible.