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
That would still be incompatible with the GPLv2 as used in the Linux kernel. Unfortunately, even if Sun and the Linux kernel community sit down and talk about license compatibility, there's no practical way for Linux to meet Sun halfway. Linux is pretty much trapped by its v2-only license and distributed copyright ownership.
The least invasive way to mitigate this license dilemma is to have an arrangement where Sun will consider relicensing specific portions of the OpenSolaris under GPLv2 or later upon the request of the Linux community. As it stands there is nothing preventing Sun from integrating Linux code under the GPLv2 with OpenSolaris under the CDDL.
That would change if OpenSolaris goes GPLv3. Then Sun would have to (at least) request that the copyright owners of portions of the Linux kernel relicense their code as GPLv2 or later.
I find it hard to believe that Sun will add a GPLv3 option for OpenSolaris. Its existence imposes restrictions on Sun integrating code from non-GPL projects. Furthermore, as used in a dual-license setup with the CDDL, there is no practical reason for recipients to elect to abide by the more restrictive GPLv3.
However, there's a distinct possibility that Sun could drop CDDL in favor of LGPLv3. They're very similar licenses, but the LGPLv3 would cut down on license proliferation and give Sun a boost in street cred. The primary reason why Sun did not use the LGPLv2 (or to a lesser extent the MPL) is because it lacks strong patent grant and non-aggression clauses.
Heck, Sun could choose to kick CDDL in favor of Ms-CL. That would be an interesting turn of events.