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A uprobes addendumA uprobes addendumPosted Jan 26, 2010 10:57 UTC (Tue) by njs (guest, #40338)In reply to: A uprobes addendum by paulj Parent article: A uprobes addendum
> By Sun apologists you probably mean me, as I've been one of the more vocal on LWN.
I'm more annoyed at people like trasz, actually, who just had to jump in and explain that no, DTrace's license incompatibility wasn't due to a strategic decision on Sun's part, it was due to problems with Linux's licensing.
I believe the following statements are true: Sun open-sourced much of their code in an attempt to join the FOSS community, because they believed there were benefits in terms of goodwill, contributions from external developers, etc. When doing so, they wrote a license for OpenSolaris that was designed at least in part with the explicit goal of keeping OpenSolaris code out of Linux. Since there's some tension in their framing themselves as an open OS company while declining to share their code with the most important existing open OS, there are some people at Sun who have at various times tried to obfuscate the intentions behind the wording of the CDDL, the avoidance of questions about ZFS patents, etc., by implying that their intention was to share the code with everyone, and if that isn't happening, then it's somehow those Linux guys fault and has nothing to do with them. Any objections to this?
I don't see how any of that's Sun bashing -- I can come up with examples of much worse corporate behavior if you like :-). It's all perfectly logical given their necessities, and I absolutely think that they were within their rights in all of that. They don't owe me anything.
But I do find it annoying that Sun has tried to mislead me (e.g., into treating them like they're some great FOSS hero, *while* they in practice decline to release their code in a form that's usable to me), and even more annoying that one can't even talk about their those reasonable strategic decisions without random third parties showing up to cloud the air with obfuscatory rhetoric. Or something like that.
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A uprobes addendum Posted Jan 26, 2010 11:59 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] When doing so, they wrote a license for OpenSolaris that was designed at least in part with the explicit goal of keeping OpenSolaris code out of Linux. Only a few people know whether or not this was the prime consideration, and they're mostly not talking (Danese Cooper is, her account is disputed by Simon Phipps). However you then also have to completely ignore the reality that there are further, reasonable considerations that have absolutely nothing to do with Linux and which officers and high-profile engineers have said went against the GPLv2 for Sun (ability for ISVs to continue to ship proprietary addons; dispreference for risk of licence forks with dual-licensing; a perceived requirement for patent protection clauses). As for open-source heros, the world is far more than just the Linux kernel surely? I'm pretty sure there's tonnes of general Unix user-space code which Sun have contributed. I'm sure there are other significant ideas and protocols which are now implemented in Linux. Yes, it'd be nice to see more integration and code-sharing between OpenSolaris and the other Unixes, I wrote as much in my last Sun blog post. I wonder if Oracle will manage to draw down this, one of the last remaining fronts of the Unix wars, and get us to a less antagonistic and more productive meeting of the minds of core Unix hackerdom?..
A uprobes addendum Posted Jan 26, 2010 14:18 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the desire to be able to allow people to ship proprietary addons in no way eliminates releasing the code under GPLv2, all they would need to do is to dual-license it as CDDL and GPLv2 and they could do everything they currently do under the CDDL and linux could use the code under the GPLv2. Since they require copyright assignment for contributions, they can change the license whenever they want.
Linux has other code in it that's dual licensed, and it's the common practice to maintain that dual license over time. The assumption is that if you are submitting a patch to a file, your patch is under the same license(s) as the rest of the code in that file (except for things that would require copyright assignments). I believe that I have seen patches that explicitly were only under one license on a file that was previously multi-license rejected for this reason. No, this would not let Sun re-license this code as they would not have the copyright assignment for it, but that's one of the realities of opensource.
Sun chooses not to do this. They have the right to do so. The fact that they make this choice disappoints me, but does not annoy me.
I don't think anyone is claiming that keeping opensolaris code out of linux was a prime consideration, but I think that it's pretty clear that it was _a_ consideration.
Like others, I do find it annoying when people make the statement that if Linux only changed it's license they could use X and therefor the fact that feature X is not in linux is solely the fault of the linux developers Because Sun made the code freely available and is disappointed that the linux developers are not using it (usually with some snide comment about nih syndrome)
also note that if the CDDL cannot be combined with the GPL, there's no way that it could legally be combined with BSD code with the result still being BSD (it could be combined with BSD code with the result being CDDL)
A uprobes addendum Posted Jan 26, 2010 18:37 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Like I've said before, at least 1 well-respected, senior engineering person
(whose code likely is running on a good proportion of Linux machines) and who was involved at a high-level with the open-sourcing of Solaris has philosophical objections to dual-licensing - nowt to do with Linux. Also, a good few Sun engineering folk have BSD backgrounds, and the BSD folk have not always had good experience with how dual-licensing worked out for them with BSD/GPL code that was part-maintained by Linux.
It's pretty clear even from external information on the net that the OpenSolaris
Anyway, this may well all be irrelevant now as it seems someone went and
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