I feel particularly slow [LWN.net]

I feel particularly slow

Posted Aug 27, 2010 6:34 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: I feel particularly slow by felixfix
Parent article: Callaway: The long, sordid tale of Sun RPC, abbreviated somewhat, to protect the [guilty] and the irresponsible

What justifies rewriting a code that has been tested for 25 years? I really don't think a new license worths the new bugs.

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I feel particularly slow

Posted Aug 27, 2010 7:37 UTC (Fri) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link] (7 responses)

Following that reasoning, Linus could just have copy-pasted parts from Minix instead of writing Linux completely from scratch.

I agree with felixfix: I don't understand why the code hasn't been rewritten from the beginning. It happens with so many other parts of Linux; I don't understand what's so special about RPC that prevents alternative compatible implementations.

I feel particularly slow

Posted Aug 27, 2010 10:27 UTC (Fri) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link] (3 responses)

> I don't understand what's so special about RPC that prevents alternative compatible implementations.

Did you read the link? spot said:

> 2) Replace the non-free code. The big problem here is that the Sun RPC implementation was pretty much the standard RPC implementation on *nix. There were some others, but switching to them would have been really, really, painful.

Technically nothing *prevents* alternative implementations, but that alone isn't a good enough reason to spend time doing it.

Have you rewritten it and/or resolved any issues caused by switching to another implementation? I know I haven't. So what you're saying is someone else should do all that work.

Why should anyone bother when the problem is "just" a licence issue (obviously licence issues are important, but the intention of this licence was not to prevent the code being used as it is in glibc.)

I feel particularly slow

Posted Aug 27, 2010 11:38 UTC (Fri) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm not complaining. I'm not blaming anyone. I'm not saying someone should have done the work.

I'm saying that I'm surprised that no-one has done it. There have been other cases of rewrites because of licensing issues (e.g. Gnome was created because of licensing issues with KDE), and there are numerous examples of multiple competing implementations of the same functionality.

Knowing that, it does seems strange to me that the community has waited 25 years for Sun/Oracle to change the license, instead of rewriting the code.

I feel particularly slow

Posted Aug 27, 2010 12:07 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Err. Noone has been waiting for 25 years. At that time, this was considered a permissive and good license. It became and was identified to be a problem only recently, once by Debian and again within the Fedora license audit and Sun made some progress and Oracle has finished the task.

I feel particularly slow

Posted Aug 27, 2010 15:36 UTC (Fri) by ESRI (guest, #52806) [Link]

I don't think anyone prevented anyone from doing the work if they wanted.

It sounds like those who evaluated the work necessary decided working on relicensing was the most cost-effective route.

I imagine if someone had come to the opposite conclusion, the code would, in fact, have been rewritten as you suggest.

I feel particularly slow

Posted Aug 27, 2010 10:28 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

As far as I know, at that time Minix hadn't been in production use for 25 years. Moreover, the goals of Minix (giving something to students to learn) and Linux (hobby) were also different.

I feel particularly slow

Posted Aug 27, 2010 11:09 UTC (Fri) by danpb (subscriber, #4831) [Link]

There's no technical reason why the code couldn't have been re-written from scratch as a cleanroom impl but still API compatible. portablexdr started off with the glibc XDR codebase + portability fixes for Win32/OS-X. When the license problems affecting the glibc XDR code in portablexdr were raised during Fedora package review, work did start on re-implementing all the Sun XDR code in portablexdr from scratch. This was a non-trivial undertaking, even though it focused only on the XDR bits and ignored the higher level SunRPC layer. Fortunately, the resolution of the license problems meant that this re-write effort never needed to be completed.

I feel particularly slow

Posted Aug 27, 2010 14:40 UTC (Fri) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

I guess it was never rewritten because:

1) It was already there and working
2) It wasn't non-free enough to justify the effort
3) Sun wasn't making a stink about it being used in conflict w/ the license
4) Sun hadn't said they wouldn't relicense the code

If the issue had come up in a high-profile law suit, I'd bet it would have been rewritten pretty damn quickly!

I wouldn't really say that anyone was 'irresponsible' in this case.