OSNews

If there is a wholesale switch to GPLv3 the Linux kernel will be left out in the cold while the Solaris kernel will look a lot more enticing to Free Software distributors.

How is linux less enticing for free software distributors? And more to the point, who among the free software distributions, or even the freedom-or-nothing side of the community, are actually committing code to the kernel?

Are IBM and HP going to switch to supporting openSolaris with code contributions? Is Red Hat going to drop the linux kernel for openSolaris?

And considering the dual-licensing, will the free software community be contributing to the openSolaris kernel knowing that their contributions must be dual-licensed under CDDL/GPL, along with copyright assignment, in order to be accepted?

Or will the free software community, which makes up but a portion of the OSS community, manage to sustain a fork of openSolaris that's pure GPL, breaking away from the advantage of upstream support from Sun? Is that an incentive for Sun to adopt the GPL? So that the free software community can immediately strip it of CDDL licenses and prevent any community contributions back to Sun? Or from the community, will the Debian maintainers, who are having a hard enough time getting linux releases out the door, adopt a forked openSolaris kernel? Will the FSF be able to manage a forked openSolaris kernel as a GNU project?

I'm certainly not saying Sun's adoption of GPL v3 is a bad thing, but I am having a hard time envisioning why this is such a monumental win for the free software community when the fact of the matter is it will remain dual-licensed with Sun reserving the right to close future versions? Everybody keeps saying "Woo hoo! GPL!" without explaining what the really means in the overall scheme of things. If free software supporters are going to be comfortable contributing to a dual licensed CDDL/GPL project, what was the opposition to CDDL in the first place? Seems to me that openSolaris is fairly viable right now with CDDL licensing, and it's starting to build up a community of it's own, so I'm not sure where the change is going to come into play. There's a lot of sound and fury here, without much clarity, and I suspect that's sort of the intent from a corporate marketing point of view.

Empty arguments about Tivoisation aside (and I say empty because the people arguing against Tivoisation weren't actually producing the code that was Tivoized), linux is still the free software community's most viable kernel. Don't underestimate the advantage of it's de-centralized ownership. Heck, even the Hurd kernel will take a step back with v3 since they won't be able to relicense the linux driver code they have incorporated over time.

Again, not to take away from Sun, but let's wait and see how things shake out before speculating on the future of free software. v3 is not even out yet, and will take some time before it's impact can realistically be judged.