Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 16th Jun 2007 21:32 UTC, submitted by Oliver
"There's been a lot of talk on lists and blogs about an exchange between Linus Torvalds, Jonathan Schwartz and Theo de Raadt regarding licensing and documentation. It all started with a 'cynical' message from Linus about Sun's motivation with regard to Open Source. Jonathan Schwartz responded by extending Linus a dinner invitation. What? The romance was briefly interrupted by a message from Theo pointing out the doublespeak."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
If you look at Schwartz's original blog post, Theo was the second or third post. He raises some good points Sun and being open.
Indeed. Both Linus and Theo raised some good points about Sun's continually strange behaviour over these things.
I didn't actually see anything particularly cynical or nasty about Linus' post. He just told it the way he saw the situation, using examples such as the talk about porting ZFS to Linux and the difficulties involved (quite apart from any coding difficulties).
Linus then went on to say that Sun was merely looking out for its own self interests here, this wasn't a bad thing per se, no one should be surprised and no one should buy too much into the 'Sun open sourcing things' hype.
Theo was spot on in pointing this out:
"There are two operating systems which surprisingly do not run on the Sun v215/v245 -- Linux and OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris?? Yes -- Sun isn't even open enough to give the OpenSolaris community enough documentation to support their new machines."
OpenSolaris not running on Sun's own hardware? That shows you that Solaris simply isn't open, if you can't get from the source code to a running system.
Sadly, all we got in reply from Jonathan Schwartz was:
"But I disagree with a few of your points. Did the Linux community hurt Sun? No, not a bit. It was the companies that leveraged their work. I draw a very sharp distinction...."
Well, that wasn't one of Linus' points, but that's a YES then. Linux did hurt you, even if you're trying to split hairs by claiming that it was indirect.
"OpenSolaris scales on any hardware, has built in virtualization, great web service infrastucture, fault management, diagnosability"
Blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Let's fill some space here so I can get to the end quicker.
"This has nothing to do with being afraid of the community (if it was, we wouldn't be so interested in seeing ZFS everywhere, including Linux, with full patent indemnity)."
That doesn't answer Linus' direct point. The main obstacle to Linux having a ZFS implementation is because of the license incompatibility and the patents they feel the need to then hold on it. Patent indemnity simply isn't required.
He didn't deny that ZFS code would not be released under any GPL version.
"But most of all, from where I sit, we should put the swords down - you're not the enemy for us, we're not the enemy for you."
Linus never said that. He just pointed out your strange behaviour.
We want to work together, we want to join hands and communities - we have no intention of holding anything back, or pulling patent nonsense.
Then do it then. It's up to you. Make ZFS available under a compatible license, and certainly don't hold patents on it that put question marks over a compatible implementation.
And to prove the sincerity of the offer, I invite you to my house for dinner. I'll cook, you bring the wine. A mashup in the truest sense.
That's nice, but I think the above might be a better idea first.