Busy busy busybox

Posted Oct 2, 2006 20:14 UTC (Mon) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link]

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/hp_and_sun_partnering...

"We also recognize that diversity and choice are important - which is why we've begun looking at the possibility of releasing Solaris (and potentially the entire Solaris Enterprise System), under dual open source licenses. CDDL (which allows customer IP to safely comingle with Solaris source code) and under the Free Software Foundation's GPL3."

This doesn't mean they will but they are clearly considering that.

Posted Oct 2, 2006 20:38 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

No, not realy.

Sun doesn't have a problem with people using their code in binaries. For instance: kernel drivers. That is something that wouldn't work out to well under the GPL. Same thing with Java stuff.

They may do a permissive version of the GPLv3 so it operates in a similar fasion to the LGPL, but I still think that is unlikely. Just less unlikely.

What I am curious about right now, personally, is what remaining compatability issues would be between the CDDL and the current GPLv3 draft.

For instance one of the big reasons for the CDDL is the patent language. Sun wanted to make sure that when people used CDDL code that they would be protected from persecution by Sun for their hefty patent portfolio in regards to the code itself. So in a way the GPLv3's patent language is actually very _business_friendly_. (keeping in mind that the vast majority of businesses are small or medium sized and lack the resources to gather patent portfolios of their own).

This was a big deal between GPLv2 and CDDL license compatability.

Now I am curious about the compatability between the GPLv3 draft and the CDDL patent language, and any other incompatabilities.

I think that if the GPLv3 works out and if there are remaining compatability issues that Sun will actually want to make a CDDLv2 so that the GPLv3 will be compatable.

That way they don't have to worry about their 'IP' being sucked back into 'Linux kernel' (since GPLv3 is not going to be GPLv2 compatable) and it would encourage all those 'GPLv2 and newer' folks (which the majority of them are) to think very strongly about supporting Solaris as a primary target.

Then on the "Free software" side of things they gain indemification against a large number of patents by way of incorporating CDDL code in snippets back into projects and they gain extra encouragement for adoption of GPLv3. (If Sun likes it, then what would be the objection?)

Seeing how Ubuntu is alinged with Sun and Sun's willingness to discuss legal issues with Debian face to face... It would be interesting to see what sort of impact it would make in the 'linux community' if Debian was to release 'GNU/Solaris Debian' as a official port.

So you get this all of a sudden:
A kernel with no legal issues concerning binary drivers
Native Dtrace support
Stable internal ABI which would pretty much eliminate kernel update headaches.
ZFS support.
Compatable with propriatory Linux applications.

In a 100% GPLv3 compatable package.

Personally I feel that propriatory drivers are bad (Linux devs should be a bit more pro-active in this manner), but stable ABI is good (for the sake of end user's sanity rather then for technical reasons). As for ZFS and Dtrace, I don't care about ZFS, but Dtrace is nice. I like the Linux kernel and have no experiance with Solaris.

But for other people I think this move would garner a large amount of attention and support for Sun and for Solaris.

Posted Oct 2, 2006 21:17 UTC (Mon) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

Everybody's expecting Sun to relicense Solaris under GPLv3. They
desperately want a license that's incompatible with the Linux kernel, but
otherwise widely used. They invented CDDL for this purpose but nobody
else bit. GPLv3 is tailor-made for their purposes.