More DTrace envy [LWN.net]

More DTrace envy

Posted Jul 3, 2008 18:04 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: More DTrace envy by mjg59
Parent article: More DTrace envy

Oh.. dead copyright holders either have successors in interest, or else they don't matter, is
what I suspect a lawyer would tell me.

to post comments

More DTrace envy

Posted Jul 3, 2008 18:31 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (5 responses)

Indeed, my understanding is that the copyright will generally end up with whoever holds the
estate. That doesn't make it easy to track them down.

More DTrace envy

Posted Jul 3, 2008 19:18 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (4 responses)

I bet there are ways to solve this problem, such as publicising a proposed change and asking
for objections. Perhaps the law has already dealt with cases where some minority of copyright
holders in a collective work can't be found and/or don't take an interest...

It's not Suns' problem though..

More DTrace envy

Posted Jul 3, 2008 19:33 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

I agree - it's unfortunate for Linux that Sun chose a license that the GPL is incompatible
with, but they were entirely within their rights to do so. My only objection is to the
repeatedly raised "Linux people hate dtrace for irrational reasons" type claims. Linux vendors
feel they can't ship dtrace for justifiable legal reasons, which means that there's little
incentive to work on the technical details. Whatever NIH tendencies the Linux community may
have, they're not the reason for ignoring dtrace.

More DTrace envy

Posted Jul 3, 2008 21:32 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

No, it's not Sun's problem.  Unfortunately, it's not Linux's problem either -- the GPLv2 was
written 15 years before the CDDL.

It's a mutual problem.

The Linux team is unable to modify the Linux Kernel's license, and the DTrace team sounds
quite unwilling to amend/modify/dual license DTrace, so I guess we're at an impasse.  Can
anything be done?

More DTrace envy

Posted Jul 3, 2008 21:51 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm sure we could find licences which predate the GPL which also would *not* have served
OpenSolaris. E.g. Solaris engineering has a fairly strong BSD background and you can bet that
licence was at least mentioned..

So, sorry, that's just a daft argument.

More DTrace envy

Posted Jul 3, 2008 22:55 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Hm, I don't understand.  What is a daft argument?  That it's a mutual problem?  That combining
CDDL and GPL code appears to be at an impasse?