Dalibor: agreed, and thanks for laying it out so clearly.

James S: appreciate the input, as i suspect there’s a substantial population of individuals that are in similar positions. i hope that eventually the OpenSolaris community recognizes the needs of folks such as yourself and caters to them as best it can.

James M: everyone i’ve spoken with has maintained that permissive, BSD style licenses can in fact be integrated into the GPL. here’s what Wikipedia says on the subject: “Code licensed under the BSD license can be relicensed under the GPL (is “GPL-compatible”) without securing the consent of all original authors.”

i’m also having a tough time buying the argument that the CDDL is somehow championing users, while the GPL is pro-dev / anti-user. the very popularity of Linux and MySQL would seem to undermine that claim significantly.

Surely it IS incompatible. The work incorporating the BSD code essentially relicenses them under the GPL. The result is no longer BSD licensed - its had its license changed (perhaps additively, but the result is code that has different licensing provisions and can’t be combined with other works in the same way as the original - and nor can bug fixes and enhancements be available to users of the original: its a fork).

I don’t understand that way that the examples for GPLd code that we want to work with are primarily user-space - even the Samba daemon. While there may be a good case for making the libc and other fundamental user-space libraries dual-licensed, I can’t see how any argument for this translates to the core kernel.

I also don’t see why we care what licence developers choose for their own projects. Surely what matters is how the license affects what can be delivered to *users* both by the community and by ISVs that enrich the choice for users.

One of the curses of the Linux licencing model has long been the ‘discussion’ over the legality of binary modules and the (childish and selfish, IMO) way that the kernel devs act in relation to them - do you want to go there with Solaris? Or do you want Solaris to be the system that sweeps this pro-dev and anti-user approach aside and puts a big flag in the ground to champion the end user - and provides a solid base on which ISVs can service those users?

The relationship between the Linux dev community and ISVs has always been somewhat unclear and ambivalent. As Linux has matured even some of the pro-open leaders have started to recognise that a more mature basis for this is necessary. Solaris starts from a good base here, so lets not allow anything that will mess it up. Its very hard to make business cases for R&D that is then opened with the only income being support based - Sun has a hardware and service business it can leverage here but small ISVs can’t and we need to at least consider the affects of licencing on business models that could bring innovation to the platform as a whole even if it is not freely licenced - because users will often care about expensive vs affordable, and not care too much about affordable vs free. I know I don’t. Please, let’s make OpenSolaris the best platform for ISVs of all types, and make sure that the license reflects that.

It was interesting to me to read your comments the same evening as http://eskar.dk/andreas/blog/?p=183 “Debian as the research library of Free Software.” I ran Debian for a long time but now it’s Ubuntu for many of the reasons Andreas referred to. I agree that a Debian base makes a good foundation for many integration projects.

If OpenSolaris could “get past” the stigma it has from the CDDL it could well fit into my future plans. Yes, I’m one individual who is currently inhibited from OpenSolaris but can envision that status changing. If the project added GPL or similarly suitable license then I would certainly take another look and encourage others to do so as well.

-james.

Having been on vacation and away from the internet last week, I desperately needed a hyper-distilled way to grok the pros/cons of the dual-licensing debate. I found exactly that by reading this entry — and especially the comments section.

Which means I now think the debate boils down to just this:

a. How big would the community gain be…

vs.

b. How likely and damaging would a license-based fork be…

Regarding b, I think it is very likely and extremely severe.

Regarding a, I think the potential for community gain is a big fat red herring. Why? Despite widespread noise to the contrary, the vast majority (i.e. >95%) of Linux and *BSD professionals and other users are simply too practical to be license zealots. (The problem is their numbers are hard to measure because they don’t blog, slashdot, etc. about their non-zealotry. Why should they?)

In other words, almost all computer professionals and students, except a tiny loud minority, are _not_ anti-CDDL. So I think community gain would be much smaller than you think it will be.

Once a GPLv3-only license-based fork of OpenSolaris exists Sun’s competitors can gang up on it and either force Sun to abandon the CDDL or force Sun out of the OpenSolaris support market. You might find such an eventuality palatable, but I don’t (and not merely because Sun pays my salary).

Assuming the assembly exception is on the table, then we have three licensing options for such a fork: CDDL only, GPLv3+assembly exception only, or GPLv3 only. Of those, the first one is still easy to integrate back into the main tree (or at least no different than the current situation), which would remain dual licensed CDDL/GPLv3+AE, save for the pure CDDL parts. The second one would seem to have the same effect: the code would be available under similarly liberal terms like CDDL (as far as my understanding of the GPLv3+AE combination goes), so it could be treated similarly.

The last option is the nuclear one, I guess, but it suffers from one major drawback: such a GPLv3-only fork would not be usable with any binary blobs / CDDL only code that exists in OpenSolaris, i.e. would need to be rewritten from scratch.

For example, a CDDL licensed libc on top of a GPLv3+AE/CDDL licensed kernel could be a sufficient detraction to keep trivial ‘GPL-purity’ forks away, I guess, as anyone wanting to ship a pure GPLv3 OpenSolaris fork would need to invest into rewriting the Sun libc first. Not that I think anyone would seriously want to maintain such a fork, anyway.