“The seemingly constant restructuring at Sun has made it difficult to find and retain consistent contacts in their licensing program. The latest blow to our efforts was the recent notification of Sun’s desire to revoke and renegotiate the FreeBSD Foundation’s SCSL license” says the FreeBSD Foundation. We hope that Sun will reconsider.
Sun revokes FreeBSD’s Java License
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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why sun is keeping to see freebsd as a treat? they cant deny the common background.
But instead of join hands and cooperate. No, they try to cut everywhere they can.
And thats sad.
According to this:
http://www.javalobby.org/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=16572
Sun also issued a brief statement saying that they had not, in fact, revoked the FreeBSD Java license.
According to Sun: “Sun has not revoked FreeBSD’s license. Sun is currently in discussions with FreeBSD regarding the renewal of their license and does not comment on ongoing third-party discussions.”
The good news is that both Sun and FreeBSD expect the issue to be resolved soon.
not that facts have stopped the usual “sun is satan” moaning from the open source crowd. I expect we’ll see more fo the same here. Given that Sun has contributed more to open source than any other company, and that it is the only company I can think of that actively opposes software patents in the EU and elsewhere, its kind of strange how they are depicted as the most incredibly evil force in modern IT by their fanatical detractors, even as Sun work for freedom against those who would take it away and who actively agitate for patents, like IBM. Odd, that’s all. Did that $1 billion IBM “gave to OSS” as they keep saying go solely into a PR campaign, or to make payoffs at groklaw and elsewhere? makes you wonder.
It seems Sun and therefore McNealy is are committed to open interfaces and Java running everywhere and hence being truly cross platform.
Those are reasons enough to like Sun.
While I don’t usually agree with the usual Sun apologists (smile, it’s a joke
, this comment seems to be right on the money.
Note that Sun still is satan, on one hand, but an angel on the other. So is IBM. Any big company suffers from multiple personality syndrome, some just have been able to hide it better 😉
Ah well, let’s just praise them when they do well and criticize when the screw up.
With all due respect, I think you are being a little too kind to Sun. Their open source contributions have been highly limited, and the only ones that users are ever likely to try are OpenOffice are the Accessibility libraries that they have worked on. I’m not saying that these are not good things, but the OpenOffice licence is not exactly the model of an OSS licence by any means. It is restrictive, and it does tend to accumulate the works of contributors and rest legal control of those works into Sun’s hands (which the GPL and BSD licences do not).
They’ve re-packaged other distros into their new ‘revelatory’ projects, such as Java Desktop System (JDS), yet managing quite handily to avoid returning any modifications that they did to those distros, the kernel and other elements of Linux back to the community.
Hey, I won’t saay that you are wrong about software patents, other than to say that there ae many other software companies getting involved, not just Sun. Yes, IBM does support the directive, but at the same time, they’ve pledged to never use their patents against OSS, where Sun (who own a large number of US software patents) have not.
In point of fact, IBM’s $1B has been highly useful to a great many software projects, most especially Kernel work and development on large-scale computing, filesystem development, server applications and many other areas. Sure, these are big-business development areas, but that’s why they have spent the money; to get a better product back. It just happens to support the community at the same time. Sun generally spend money and the community doesn’t get anything back.
And finally, that $1B was three years ago, long before Groklaw was created. They’ve continued to aid development efforts since then, and that is to their credit.
It is important to note that Groklaw has received no backing from IBM. That has been clearly stated by both PJ and IBM themselves, although SCO and their followers continue to make the accusation. The more pertinent question is: If Groklaw members really are putting in all that work for free to assist IBM, a big multi-national company, then why? Because IBM has earned their trust and respect, and they genuinely wish to help a company that they see as an ally and a friend.
Why does Sun not engender such positive feeling and support? Analysis of their record will show that they have not been nearly as kind to OSS as you believe, and have caused problems for a lot of people. Good trees bear good fruit, and bad trees only bear bad fruit. OSS people really don’t like Sun very much, and that alone should indicate that they probably have good cause.
Question: FreeBSD is a project that doesn’t charge for distribution or use, and simply adds Java to their distro, along with Sun’s limitations on alteration, but with the ability to redistribute the complete binary…
They also have no money to pay Sun for the use of Java.
Therefore, there is nothing that can be renegotiated on FreeBSD’s part. They have nothing else to give.
Therefore, and demand to renegotiate on Sun’s part is synonymous with revoking their licence.
I guess we’ll see in a few weeks.
From everything that I’ve read…
I understand that Berkley was the largest contributer to OSS. Sun did contribute OO.o, Looking Glass, and some Gnome work, but what else have they contributed that was significant? Tho they do like to spout off that they are the BIGGEST OSS supporters, but I can’t see that is a positive for them but only a PR trick. IBM’s contributions are just as important in my book as SUN’s. IBM donated enerprise class tools to the kernel, a database, plus is fighting SCO all the way to the end validating Linux, promising not to use its patent portfollio on OSS, and paid Novell $50mil to invest in SUSE and fight SCO. PLUS IBM doesn’t feel the need to toot its own horn when it comes to the OSS crowd.
SUN also FULLY supports patents and IP as it is. JS made the lip service he thought patents might be rewarded a bit too loose. But I think the incident with Kodak and how SUN SCREWED the OSS community forever because of it shows SUN’s real attitude. Not only that JS has been quoted saying he supports tighter IP laws and patents.
And although I turn noone down for friendship, and I’m not turning down SUN’s because I like to believe the best I can about everyone, but I think if you look at the bigger picture, SUN is in bed with MS. They made a deal with the devil where MS would take the low end and SUN would take the high end with Linux as their whipping boy.
But thank you for coming here to support SUN. They need it and it keeps us on our toes as to why we should always keep on eye on them.
PS: Your little comment about Groklaw is what really opened my eyes. Very good indication of who you are and what you stand for.
With many big companies (and Sun is one of those) it’s often hard to talk about the company as a whole, and blanket statements like “Sun is committed to Open-Source” are often irrelevant. There are only very few cases where a company-wide policy can exist for such an issue, but in general every business unit will have its own way of working, and sometimes even the different groups within a business unit do things differently.
In a previous job of mine, we were doing software that had to deal with several pieces of hardware from a same vendor. For some of the pieces we could get very broad documentation, face-to-face support, advance documentation, hardware samples, long-term roadmaps… For some other pieces we only got partial documentation. For some other we only got minimal documentation after the hardware was deprecated, which in that case wasn’t even enough to get that deprecated hardware to work even close to well.
You’ve made quite a lot of interesting claims there, including that Sun have acted illegally by refusing to give back modifications to GPLed software. I find that hard to believe, to say the least. In fact I find it especially bizarre given that the JDS is distributed with the source code on 3 CDs. One of which – I just checked – contains the kernel source they used.
Secondly, regarding Sun’s open source contributions, I think lots of people (as you pointed out) use OpenOffice (which is under an officially OSS-compatible licence of course, so I don’t know what your quibbles are there), but also Sun has made a massive contribution to Gnome, and an expensive contribution too, to X.org & xfree, there’s NFS, netbeans, JXTA, project looking glass, there’s actually a whole world of software the Sun has contributed to quite substantially. See http://www.sunsource.net for more details. Fact is, in a study I saw of the ultimate origins of all the code on a Red hat CD, Sun came #2 accounting for 17% of it by LOC, after only Berkely. So saying “Sun hasn’t contributed to open source” is to say “hello, I have an agenda, I hate Sun, and I’m going to downright lie to bring them down”, quite frankly.
Yes, it is reasonable to be critical of Sun’s quite schizophrenic attitude at times. This is true of any company. IBM has a schizophrenic attitude. It has whole divisions that hate linux and adore AIX, and likewise windows. IBM’s contributions to linux are very different to those of Sun. IBM has contributed in more of a PR sense, than a substantive code sense. And although IBM has made contributions to linux on the code side, they tend to be on the server-side. IBM avoids making contributions to pushing linux onto the desktop like the plague, where Sun is if anything Linux’s biggest pusher on the desktop – but not on the server. Each of these companies has business (on the corporate desktop and server) that could be disrupted by linux, and both see linux as being a potentially disruptive technology in a way favourable to their interests in another.
Finally, saying “oh all OSS folk hate Sun, therefore they are right” at the end is downright silly. You might as well say “oh everybody believes the earth is flat, therefore it is true”. All that shows is that there are many OSS folk who are zealotous, and annoyed about the fact Sun won’t adopt linux 100% fanatically as they woudl wish.
You see, for all that OSS advocates talk about “fighting a monoculture”, they are in fact trying to establish a monoculture. How else to explain the wails of anguish and hatred whenever Sun says “we’re not going to abandon Solaris just because of the latest wall street hype?”
Finally, I would consider myself an “OSS advocate” of sorts. I use linux primarily, I have contributed OSS code myself to various projects, and I don’t think Sun are an incredibly evil company. I thin they have some bad PR, at least among the linux crowd, and that some things they do may be questionable from a business sense, though they seem to have improved of late. But then, I don’t want a linux monoculture, and I fancy I have therefore something of a sense of perspective because I’m not a zealot. I just don’t recognise any decent, explainable origin for this “Sun is evil” meme.
That FreeBSD trademark is now in FreeBSD’s posession. It no longer belongs to WindRiver! That’s cool news too.
Sun as lost a major percentage of market in prol of Linux or *BSD, it’s natural they start defending their self.
It’s a shame that this war’s between *nix exists …
Microsoft is the only one who win’s with this stupid war.
*nix is taking market to each one, and not to Microsoft.
Sun is trying to be the Top 2 in OS… But at the moment Linux is the top2.
Why does it say that they are re-negotiating the license in the body text, but that they are revoking it in the title? A news site should be about presenting the facts, intermingled with editorial opinion – not biasing the news. I expected better of this site.
Question: FreeBSD is a project that doesn’t charge for distribution or use, and simply adds Java to their distro, along with Sun’s limitations on alteration, but with the ability to redistribute the complete binary…
Well distribyting a Java(tm) certified binary does matter.
However the FreeBSD foundation does recieve money from donations and have used that to pay for certification tests before. The current issue is really a non issue as it was a miscommunication issue and will be sorted ASAP according to official sources.
They also have no money to pay Sun for the use of Java.
FreeBSD foundation has money and have paid for certification tests.
Therefore, there is nothing that can be renegotiated on FreeBSD’s part. They have nothing else to give.
Again, as I stated above this is not true and this issue is being sorted.
Therefore, and demand to renegotiate on Sun’s part is synonymous with revoking their licence.
It is just so obvious that you like IBM and just dislikes Sun that you should check up a bit on opensource history. Historically, IBM is the company that you should be suspicious of, not Sun. But I guess you are so blinded by their “committment” to Linux that everything else is forgiven. Talk about being hypocritical.
“but the OpenOffice licence is not exactly the model of an OSS licence by any means. It is restrictive, and it does tend to accumulate the works of contributors and rest legal control of those works into Sun’s hands (which the GPL and BSD licences do not).”
Err… Wait a second. From what I’m reading here:
http://www.openoffice.org/license.html
OpenOffice uses a dual-licensing scheeme, no diffrent than Mozilla. Which means they DO use the GPL license. My understanding of dual-licensing is that you can choose which license’s terms you wish to follow between the two, and can only choose one and not both.
So what are you complaining about here? All of OpenOffice *is* OpenSource.
I may be missing something here… If I am, then correct me. This is just my interpertation of the situation.
http://www.sunsource.net
Soon to be added: OpenSolaris. Jim Grisanzio, the OpenSolaris community manager, has a web log over at http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jimgris
Sun really needs to reach out to the community – all I keep hearing are “stories” that make me like Sun less and less. FreeBSD is never going to be a source of big Java royalities for Sun. So Sun should just stay away from FreeBSD altogher or consider the FreeBSD Java license an act of good will. The FreeBSD Foundation has *way* better things to do with their money than pay for a Java license.
I am a Sun certified Java programmer (in 2000) and used to really be interested in Java and Sun Ray and all. But Sun has been coming across as real jerks in the media lately and with Mono/.NET I see less and less reason to stay in Sun’s camp.
Sun really needs to do some good PR and present a clear and very compelling strategy to the IT industry – or they will begin to hemorrhage and lose all but the hard core fans
… that the FreeBSD Foundation has to spend time, money,
and persons (their resources) for things like a new Java License with Sun instead of into things like Performance Optimizations and such.
The header for this article is just plain alarmist, it is a shame that OSNews would print that garbage.
If anybody bothered to read the article, which from the responses I gather most people didn’t, it says there very clearly that: “From what we can determine, Sun is re-negotiating all SCSL licenses to standardize their Java revenue model.”
Emphasis on (1) renegotiating, very different from revoking, and (2) all licenses are receiving the same treatment, rather than FreeBSD being singled out as the header seems to imply.
If I were a lawyer for Sun, I would be considering a libel suit. It makes perfect sense that Sun (or any company) would try to move all its licenses to a single model. This simplifies things and leads to savings. It also makes perfect sense that Sun will leave the FreeBSD foundation to the last. After all, it needs to take care of its *paying* customers first, don’t you think?
It’s not about whether Sun is evil or not. Using ANY corporate -controlled software means having your chain yanked painfully, either now or later. If there’s an open alternative available, take it.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20573
“Sun really needs to do some good PR and present a clear and very compelling strategy to the IT industry – or they will begin to hemorrhage and lose all but the hard core fans”
This sentence sums up Sun’s situation since about 2000.
Sun actually is, in fact, a huge contributor to open source, in terms of code donation. OpenOffice, huge Gnome contribution, Project Looking Glass, NetBeans, and lot’s of Java oriented stuff, have all been very helpfull to Linux and open source software.
However, they come off as very schitzophrenic about their attitude towards open source. Their attacks on Red Hat are laughable, their paying of a SCO lincense is extremely suspicious, and their huge “cross licensing” and “patent arsenal” deal with Microsoft really puts their motives in the wrong light (even though their horrible financial situation makes it half-way understandable – tough to turn away $1.9 billion).
Then there is Sun’s sales pitch of “Red Hat Sucks, unless we sell it to you and you buy our hardware”:
Jon Schwartz saying Red Hat sucks:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdewk/is_200404/ai_ziff12…
Sun selling Red Hat:
http://www.sun.com/software/linux/index.xml
Then there is Jon Schwartz saying “IBM is in a pickle. IBM has a problem”
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040801
(and other ludicrous statements).
hmmmmmmmm – yeah IBM’s pickle is making boatloads of money, having a healthy stock, and having the trust and respect of the IT and open source worlds. I’m sure IBM wish they were in Sun’s enviable position of losing money hand over fist, having a plumeting stock price, and being the laughing stock of the IT world (in spite of making great products).
Bottom line is that Sun has made great products (Solaris, Java, top notch big iron servers), and has made huge open source contributions (already mentioned). But they still manage to come off as two-faced and not trustworthy, and their blabbermouth leaders (Schwartz and McNealy) just make them look unbelievably stupid.
it sounds like they just want to renegoiate the license. it seems thre was something they didn’t like in it origionally.
no need to worry.. sun isn’t gonna hurt a bsd on purpose. i mean look, solaris has plenty of bsd code in it.
“i mean look, solaris has plenty of bsd code in it.”
leech
“Therefore, there is nothing that can be renegotiated on FreeBSD’s part. They have nothing else to give.”
I thought they actually paid for that license. Remember than non-profit doesn’t mean flatbroke. But what the heck? What gives? It was all miscommunication from the start. So in fact, there’s not really much to discuss here anyway…
Since they’re open sourcing Solaris, why can’t they finally open source Java already? It’s a trivial thing, and Sun makes a big deal out of it.
Sun just did FreeBSD a favor. This is actually good news. I think Java is too slow and buggy for general use. The Java VM is still too bloated and slow to be really useful.
I switched from Java to Mono the middle of last year, and I couldn’t be happier.
That was funny. java simply blows off mono in terms of performance. why do you think they remove the java performance related stuff from mono web site? you are funny..
Mono is definitely faster for me. Since I use legacy libraries, I felt Mono was a much better solution. It is platform independent as well as language independent.
I suspect they removed it from the website, because of legal threats from Sun. We all know from past experience that you can’t talk about Java without Sun logo compliance (has to be 100% pure). Just ask MS, they got sued for it.
Good discussion on this here:
http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?hl=en&lr=&threadm=1104970998.0020…
Strange thing you are the sole person who makes those claims.
Ok, now go and read this page:
http://www.mono-project.com/about/whymono.html
Before the same page contain this information:
“However, the Java runtime systems commonly available on Linux lack the performance that customers demand, and Java applications do not conform to the Linux GUI look and feel…
…NET and its new language, C#, however, offer the performance and appearance of native code.”
Apparently they saw that their claims are no where near reality, they made a nice u turn. you can ask to the mono web people about this issue.
Why spend time to port SUN’s unfree JRE instead of working on GNU Classpath? In that case, you wont have to fear that a situation like this will occur again…
I know this is not strictly on topic, but can anyone recommend a good walk-through on how to build Java on a FreeBSD 5.2.x or 5.3 machine? I myself have no direct need of Java on my FreeBSD box, but I know of a few people (including a vocal user of a freebsd wiki I contribute to, freebsdwiki.net,) who have had issues with building the JRE/JDK and getting it to play nice with mozilla/firefox native FreeBSD builds. So…any suggestions?
um, isnt mono only packaged with the novell distros? i think most people are still looking at is as a legal trojan horse. not quite sure what you are referring to being “bloated” in java. the jvm? the api? the compiler?