Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 9th Aug 2007 17:28 UTC, submitted by vondur
"Don't expect to see key features of OpenSolaris showing up in the Linux kernel," said a top Linux maintainer. At his LinuxWorld opening keynote, Andrew Morton made it very clear that the appointment of former OSDL CTO and Debian co-founder Ian Murdock to Sun's OS platforms organization will not translate into a merging between the open source version of Solaris Unix with Linux. He didn't mince words. "It's a great shame that OpenSolaris still exists. They should have killed it," said Morton, addressing one attendee's question about the possibility of Solaris' most notable features being integrated into the kernel. "It's a disappointment and a mistake by Sun." Morton said none of those features - Zones, ZFS, DTrace - will end up in the Linux kernel because Sun refuses to adopt the GPL.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
The issue at bar is ultimately license fragmentation. Copyleft is a good idea, but it stops being practical when everybody and their dog creates their own copyleft license. The GPL came first, and Linux is, for better or worse, licensed under the GPL.
OpenSolaris is the first kernel to use a non-GPL copyleft license. We've never had competing copylefts at the kernel level until Sun made it so. Developing under copyleft is like blowing a bubble. Everybody developing under the GPL is blowing into the same bubble.
Now Sun has started blowing their own bubble. Developers have to choose which bubble to blow on. There's no way that their breath can inflate both bubble simultaneously. The bubbles have to grow independently, even if everybody would like to see them merge.
Competition is good. Fragmentation is bad. If Sun had decided to license OpenSolaris as GPLv2 or later, that would have been a great day for free software. Competition within the bubble, where developers can compile the best work from either project, would be outstanding. That's the great shame to which Andrew refers.
Now, it's not really Sun's fault. Copyleft licenses are unabashedly egocentric. They're a model of universal gravitation for software. Code falls into orbit around its copyleft license. Following the analogy, each copyleft license is a distinct solar system. Before we had the GPL solar system plus some comets of the BSD persuasion. Now we have two solar systems.
So while it's easy to see the Linux developers as close-minded or fundamentalists, they're really just slaves to the license. Copylefts don't coexist. They're isolationist and protectionist. Like it or not, this is an implication of copyleft. Again, it's a great shame.
As much as I admire Solaris on its technical merits, it's existence is unfortunate for Linux. Likewise, the existence of Linux has been unfortunate for Solaris for years. Copyleft is a join-em or fight-em proposition. Whether or not this is good for users is highly debatable.
Microsoft isn't splitting the Linux community with patent covenants nearly as much as Sun is splitting the free software community with the CDDL.