SmartOS (based on IllumOS) released

SmartOS (based on IllumOS) released - with KVM

Posted Aug 16, 2011 13:54 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576)
In reply to: SmartOS (based on IllumOS) released - with KVM by paulj
Parent article: SmartOS (based on IllumOS) released - with KVM

>However the resulting combined work of IllumOS + Linux KVM surely is derived of BOTH those works

Your 'surely' here is not universally agreed upon - both IllumOS and KVM were developed independently of each other and neither requires the other. On that basis it's hard to see why either would be considered a derivative of the other just because they happen to be used together.

I expect your argument is that modifying KVM to make it work with IllumOS *makes* it a combined work derivative of both (that would be my argument in your place, anyway). That seems reasonable, but it *also* seems reasonable to conclude that bundling the two together with some modification necessary for technical reasons of interoperability is insufficient for these two separate works to now be considered one single work derivative of both.

I'm not saying 'there is definitely no problem', but I am saying that the situation isn't as clear as you make out, and a sound argument could be made that there is no single combined derivative work.

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SmartOS (based on IllumOS) released - with KVM

Posted Aug 16, 2011 14:17 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (4 responses)

They are, separately, independent works, of course. However the KVM announced here is not the stock Linux KVM, but one ported (with significant effort) to work within Illumos. I thought that was reasonably obvious from the blog post. ;) I.e. it is a derived work of Linux KVM and Illumos.

To quote the blog post: "just getting it to compile in any meaningful form would take significant effort", "KVM is so tightly integrated into the Linux kernel", "hard to know when to pull in the Linux implementation of a particular facility or function versus writing our own or making a call to the illumos equivalent (if any)". The blog post seems to be fairly explicit about the fact that much judgement, work and creativity was needed to solve a number of problems. It's very hard to think software copyright wouldn't apply to the apparently substantial amount of code they say they had to modify, re-write and write.

My understanding is that the bar to a work being derived is pretty low. I.e. small patches with obvious, no-other-way fixes might not be worthy of copyright, but if there's any room for creativity then that implies that the work does fall under copyright. Further, when you have a one body of code dependent on a very *specific* other piece of code, then my understanding is that the dependent code derives from the other. The Illumos KVM patch seems, by the blog post, to depend on both the Linux KVM and IllumOS code.

That said, the CDDL and the GPL are both free software licenses, and if all the copyright holders concerned are all happy, then there needn't be a problem.

SmartOS (based on IllumOS) released - with KVM

Posted Aug 16, 2011 18:40 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (3 responses)

"I thought that was reasonably obvious from the blog post. ;) I.e. it is a derived work of Linux KVM and Illumos."

Why "... and Illumos" ?

SmartOS (based on IllumOS) released - with KVM

Posted Aug 16, 2011 20:47 UTC (Tue) by jone (guest, #62596) [Link] (2 responses)

Perhaps that should really read:

"it is a derived work of Linux, KVM, and Illumos"

realistically KVM (or the KVM modules more specifically) is a derived (and dependent) work from interfaces in the Linux kernel, and the Joyent port is a derived work of certain Linux interfaces (some they chose not to port), KVM interfaces, and the Illumos kernel .. (of course there are derived works in the linux kernel from earlier sun code covered now by the CDDL - but who's counting?)

there's a good talk that bmc did (is doing?) for linux-kvm 2011 forum this week that goes into much more detail on what was involved .. slides here:
http://www.linux-kvm.org/wiki/images/7/71/2011-forum-port...

SmartOS (based on IllumOS) released - with KVM

Posted Aug 17, 2011 15:21 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link]

The story told there is that this KVM is a straight derivative from the original code, and thus GPLv2 only (look at the code's notices in Linux). Very bad...

SmartOS (based on IllumOS) released - with KVM

Posted Aug 18, 2011 18:31 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

There is no "derived work from interfaces". "Abstraction, Filtration, Comparison" -- Google it, please. If there was such thing, Linux would be a derived work from Unix, remember the SCO case? "errno.h" etc...