Recommendation: no GPLv3 for Solaris
Posted Feb 10, 2007 18:58 UTC (Sat) by
landley (guest, #6789)
In reply to:
Recommendation: no GPLv3 for Solaris by notamisfit
Parent article:
Recommendation: no GPLv3 for Solaris
The incompatability between CDDL and GPLv2 is a design goal. They _want_
a license that prevents Linux from using Solaris code. If they wanted to
use Linux, they'd be using Linux. Remember the internal sun politics
yanking Linux from "the java desktop" and replacing it with Solaris?
There's been a 5-way civil war going on inside Sun for years now (which is
more complicated than I want to go into here), and the Solaris faction
just wants to _survive_ at this point.
Linux is eating their lunch, so they want Solaris to copy its' advantages.
But they do NOT just want to contribute the Solaris code to Linux. Open
sourcing was a move to _defend_ Solaris against loss of market share to
Linux. So Solaris MUST be under an incompatible license. (True or not,
this is what motivates their decision-making process.) Sun is trying to
compete against Linux and hold (or even gain) market share against it.
Unfortunately for them, CDDL was seen as "sun community license take 2",
with perhaps a lesson or two learned from the Apple Public License and
IBM's long-ago attempt to do their own license, and external uptake was
close to zero. (Modulo Jorg Schilling, who worships Solaris already.)
GPLv3 is tailor-made for Sun. It's blessed by the FSF and totally
incompatible with Linux. This is EXACTLY what Sun wants, of _course_
they're moving to it. As soon as the Linux developers formally said "we
are never moving to GPLv3" Sun's ears perked up and it joined the FSF in
chanting "my preciousss" towards it...
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