Free software

Posted Jul 22, 2025 15:31 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Free software by khim
Parent article: Enforcement (or not) for module-specific exported symbols

> What else do you need to believe that all the people involved expected that this would make ZFS incompatible with Linux?

Yes, that was the end-result. But... *AGAIN* this was NOT the primary aim of either management or engineering. The starting point of each of those parties was that they wanted a GPL compatible licence!!! Eng wanted BSD (while hating the GPL, most of them), and management the GPLv2!

The only party that, as its initial starting point, was not keen on this was legal. As I've said, they didn't like the draughting (AIUI from what I could glean from the high up engineer in my group); further, as per what you've linked to, patents were another issue (Sun had been the target of patent shake-downs throughout its history, from an early shake-down by IBM, to Kodak in the early 00s over Java - so building defences against patent trolls was strong in the corporate and legal psyche at Sun) - the GPLv2 lacked patent MAD terms, those were expected to be added in GPLv3.

Free software

Posted Jul 22, 2025 15:36 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Oh, and Sun did go on to release Java under the GPLv2 in '07. So the legal issues weren't insurmountable. Perhaps the stink over the CDDLing of Opensolaris also was a factor in going with the GPLv2 for OpenJDK - no idea. Schwartz was trying to position Sun as the leader in open source though.