"Amid falling sales of its bread-and-butter servers and mounting pressure on Schwartz to cut more jobs and boost a stock price that's dropped more than 22%, to USD 5.26, since early February, Sun is considering its most radical open-source move yet: releasing Solaris under the love-it-or-hate-it GPL. The move could reinvigorate Sun by putting one of its crown jewels into the thick of the open-source movement - or it could diminish the worth of one of Sun's most valuable pieces of intellectual property."
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Member since:2007-03-30
Member since:2005-07-06
This is *not* true. CDDL licensed code does not give any special rights to Sun.
Re-read the article. It does not say that the CDDL is responsible for giving rights to Sun on any code you write regarding OpenSolaris. It's by virtue of Sun holding the copyright, which begs the question why the CDDL was even necessary, if not to purely make CDDL code incompatible with code licensed under other open source licenses - specifically the GPL.
Signing a joint-copyright agreement such as the Sun Contributor Agreement is the *only* way to give any special rights to Sun.
Which you have to do to contribute to OpenSolaris, which means that the article is correct.
This statement is also incorrect. The GPLv2 would not work, only GPLv3 due to specific patent rights that need to be granted that ZFS and other technologies Sun has are to be used.
Sorry, but that does not make the statement in the article incorrect. If ZFS and various other things were under the GPL then they would show up in Linux and there'd be a lot more cross-pollination - which is what Sun needs to keep Solaris development and ideas afloat. That's the way the open source concept really works. As it is, one is entitled to ask why on Earth Sun felt the need to patent various things that made ZFS and Solaris code far less portable.
The GPLv2 has several holes and that is why even the FSF is releasing a new version to fix them.
The GPL version 2 is a perfectly reasonable license, and the FSF is trying to improve the GPL in the ways it sees fit. That doesn't mean that the existing GPL version 2 has any holes at all in it - and none that are relevant here.
Not only that, even the article itself quotes a Sun member saying that it is very unlikely given that many of the 30,000 people that have worked on or contributed to Solaris are against it.
OK. The relevant part of the article is this:
"The license was "perfect for Java," since its requirement that users republish their modifications to Java's source code prevents proprietary versions"
Which apparently is OK now for Java, when it most certainly hasn't been in the past. However, when it comes to Solaris the tune abruptly changes:
"More than 30,000 programmers have worked on OpenSolaris projects, and things won't change without their say-so, Phipps says. "They're pretty skeptical about using the GPL," he says, "no matter how enthusiastic Jonathan is.""
So how are the positive effects of the GPL OK for Java, namely the reasonable prevention of proprietary versions, and somehow not OK for OpenSolaris?
Member since:2005-07-06
Re-read the article. It does not say that the CDDL is responsible for giving rights to Sun on any code you write regarding OpenSolaris. It's by virtue of Sun holding the copyright, which begs the question why the CDDL was even necessary, if not to purely make CDDL code incompatible with code licensed under other open source licenses - specifically the GPL.
WRONG. Read page three of the article:
Sun holding the copyright does not mean a bloomin' thing. If you modify Solaris code, your contributions are your own unless you give Sun joint copyright ownership via a contributor agreement.
Wrong again. The article claimed that the license itself caused changes to "revert to Sun" -- which is wholly incorrect.
Also, you do NOT have to sign an SCA to contribute to OpenSolaris. Some third party contributions can be integrated without one and have been if they have an appropriate license.
Sun already is getting cross-pollination from FreeBSD, other BSDs, Mac OS X and more. Linux is the only left out in the cold thanks to their license.
Just as the BSD was the right license for BSD, and GPL the right license for Linux and Java, the CDDL is the right license for OpenSolaris. No one license is right for every project.
Member since:
2005-07-06
This article is full of several inaccuracies. Not only is it wild speculation based on a post made by Schwartz a *year* ago; it is little more than pandering by a media press member for web traffic.
A few examples of inaccurate and complete false statements from the article:
This is *not* true. CDDL licensed code does not give any special rights to Sun. Signing a joint-copyright agreement such as the Sun Contributor Agreement is the *only* way to give any special rights to Sun.
Releasing code under the CDDL does NOT give Sun any more rights to it than anyone else receiving the same code under the same license.
Also, the article says that:
quickly show up inside Linux," says Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, which distributes a version of Linux that runs on Sun's Niagara chips. "Then it's legal to take code out of Solaris and put it into Linux."
This statement is also incorrect. The GPLv2 would not work, only GPLv3 due to specific patent rights that need to be granted that ZFS and other technologies Sun has are to be used.
The GPLv2 has several holes and that is why even the FSF is releasing a new version to fix them.
Not only that, even the article itself quotes a Sun member saying that it is very unlikely given that many of the 30,000 people that have worked on or contributed to Solaris are against it.
Edited 2007-05-01 00:06 UTC