dtrace on Linux

Posted Sep 22, 2008 15:42 UTC (Mon) by zooko (guest, #2589)
In reply to: dtrace on Linux by corbet
Parent article: KS2008: Tracing

Wait, what happens if Sun decides to try to use all of its copyrights to sue Linux distributors or users or otherwise to do harm to Linux development? Haven't they already granted a permanent, irrevocable Free Software licence over the current versions of DTrace and ZFS, in the form of the CDDL?

I have a feeling that you already addressed this in your "What if Sun turns Evil?" article, but I don't recall any actual problems that could result from use of DTrace or ZFS source code.

dtrace on Linux

Posted Sep 22, 2008 17:33 UTC (Mon) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Well, there is Sun's ongoing refusal to answer questions like "Are you willing to grant a license to any ZFS patents you hold to other FOSS implementations?", which creates at least a cloud of uncertainty about what they might do if they became evil, or just decided that Linux was catching up with Solaris and threatening them.

Unless they have changed their mind and answered this at some point. I hope so -- haven't followed closely.

But paulj is right re: copyrights; Sun wrote the CDDL in such a way that combining CDDL and GPLv2 violates the GPL but not the CDDL. This has the same effect in practice as not granting permission, but it means that for copyright issues we don't need to worry about Sun-turns-SCO -- we need to worry about SCO-turns-SCO.