Moglen can safely say anything ONLY about FSF's stuff

Moglen can safely say anything ONLY about FSF's stuff

Posted Jan 31, 2008 10:10 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: wanted: Debian/Solaris by zooko
Parent article: LCA: The state of Debian

...and I'd like to see the actual phrase used. Because it all boils down to the "special exception": "the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable". It can be argued the "component itself" does not "accompanies the executable" since it's not library but the whole OS, but it's slippery slope.

If we can use Solaris libc then why not Microsoft's closed source one ? And if Microsoft will add a lot of proprietary extensions for Firefox and OpenOffice.org and bundle it all in Microsoft's libc - it all will be legal too ? It's very dangerous direction to be dragged into and all cited samples don't have this problem: they all are separate addons - either they are not distributed with OS at all (Fink or BlastWare) or they can be separated (sunfreeware can be thrown away OpenSolaris will continue to work) - not the case of Nexenta.

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I'm sorry, I don't exactly follow your argument.  Let me put it this way: what are we afraid
of?  Are we afraid that if we start happily using Nexenta -- a Free, Open Source kernel, Free,
Open Source libc and libraries, and a complete Free, Open Source userland, that this will
somehow lead to Microsoft taking over Firefox?

I am not trying to be provocative here, but I just don't understand why fear, uncertainty, and
doubt about some subtle hypothetical issue is important enough to cause people to avoid using
and contributing to a beautiful, Free, Open Source set of tools.

As I understand it, the designers of the GPL v2 did not intend for the GPL to cause this sort
of incompatibility, and they did not think that the GPL v2 did cause such incompatibility, but
since some people were apparently afraid that GPL v2 might do so, they further clarified GPL
v3 in order to assuage people's concerns.

Regards,

Zooko

the CDDL is not compatible with the GPL period.

this means that you can't take CDDL code (ZFS) and include it in GPL code (the linux kernel)

until sun changes the licensing of ZFS to be compatible with the GPL there is no way to
integrate the two.

there are portions of ZFS that have been released under the GPL (enough for GRUB to be able to
read files from it), but most of the code has not been.

the only people who can fix this incompatibility are at Sun.

I wasn't talking about shipping a kernel comprising Linux and ZFS.  I was talking about
Nexenta -- http://nexenta.org -- a project to compile Ubuntu packages on Solaris so that you
can use all the familiar userland tools such as apt-get and also the beautiful new Solaris
tools such as ZFS and dtrace.

For example, the nexenta folks have created a tool called "apt-clone", which uses ZFS
snapshots to make it possible to rewind to that particular set of installed debian packages.
Isn't that awesome?