[H-GEN] OpenSolaris!

[Benjamin Carlyle]

On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 13:28 +1100, James C. McPherson wrote:
> [insert "I do not speak for Sun Microsystems" disclaimer here]
<snip/>
>  From what I have seen internally over the past 5 years at Sun,
> there is a lot of respect for Linux within the Solaris engineering
> community (which I have a part in), and the teams view OpenSolaris
> as a significant opportunity to offer an alternative way of
> implementing a {Unix-family} OS.

I suspect developers need to be careful about looking at Solaris code
with a view to repeating what they've seen in Linux, and likewise linux
developers may have to be careful about what they would contribute to
OpenSolaris. Sure, it's fine to recontribute your own work but if you're
you're copying someone else's work there may be issues. Like
closed-source software, open-source software is not public domain and
can't be copied from one place to the other without reference the the
relevant licence agreements. When Microsoft code has leaked onto the
internet in days past I seem to recall fairly strong statements that
anyone who had seen such code would not be able to work on the same
kinds of features in Linux as they had seen in the leaked code. There's
too much of a risk that subconscious copying (or the perception of it)
could lead to future legal difficulties.

I wouldn't suggest that the two developers should be mixing while the
CDDL/GPL divide exists. It's that fracture in open source that PJ speaks
against in her article. In her view it is everyone-but-the-GPL that is
at fault. It appears that Sun's perspective is that opensource.org is
right and not the GPL.

Still, even if no copying or cross-pollination can occur at the code
level the open sourcing of Solaris should bring the developers closer at
the collaborative community level. From that perspective even with the
GPL/OSI fracture we should all see some benefits from Sun's undeniably
generous and positive actions.

> It really really bugs me that some people out there view Sun's
> efforts at opening up Solaris as "Sun is going to take away the
> pie from Linux." That has _always_ been a load of bollocks and
> imho betrays an inability to think about what benefits could be
> derived for Linux and *BSD. The pie is much bigger now whether
> you're a GPL-purist or not. If you don't want to look at the
> source in OpenSolaris, don't do it. Nobody is forcing you. What
> Sun is doing is providing the opportunity to people who want it.

:) I think it's just another example of why the GPL doesn't play nice
with other licenses and why strong divisions about which side of the
fence represents "real" open source will continue to harm the freedoms
that open source should be bringing to everyone. At the moment you do
have to decide which side of the fence you'll live on and you can't go
and play on the other side whenever you feel like it. I believe that
does set up one community in competition with another, at least if the
two communities have similar goals and seek to attract similar kinds of
developers. This may not be the case for Solaris and Linux given their
radically different histories. On the other hand, it may be a the case
for Solaris and Linux if both communities see their software positioned
in the same way in five or ten years time. Let's just hope that there
will be an oversupply of appropriate people at the appropriate times and
that both will survive. Other open-source kernels have survived so far
with different ideological and legal divides in-place, so that hope is
not entirely a naive one.

> I encourage you to read Simon Phipps' blog entry re
> PJ's article
> 
> http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/webmink/20050126
> 
> ------------------
> ...
>   Maybe the real need is for the GPL purists to be more accepting of the 
> OSI approach and join the world of tolerant pragmatists
> ------------------

Ed: I get a bit bloggy and ramble past this point.
    Sorry.
    It's past my bedtime.

Of course, the other issue that I haven't explored is how
well OSI-approved licenses interoperate generally.
Interoperability does not seem to be criteria for OSI approval
at all, so is this really just a problem with GPL and the
rest of the world or is it equally a problem between one
GPL-incompatable license and another? What about
CDDL-compatibility?

The reason we keep writing new licenses is to add
restrictions on users and distributors not found in other
licenses and to protect our arses in ways not protected
under other licenses. This would seem to imply that
compatibility generally is not something new license
authors actually want at all! If I wanted you to be
able to release some of my code under that other license
I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of writing a new license.

Presently in order to write code that is transplantable you either
need to dual/n-license your code under all licenses you can
accept or you must write your code in a very liberal license
such as the new BSD license. That's ok for an individual, but once
something as big as a kernel comes along, I imagine it's harder
to shift that momentum. I don't think well see linux dual-licensed
in the near future. Maybe we'll see Solaris dual-licensed, but that
seems unlikely in the near future also.

In order to make CDDL and GPL compatible we have to look
at both directions of travel. CDDL->GPL could be achieved
by dual licensing of the software or dropping the CDDL
in favour of something like LGPL or newBSD. Both options
are probably unacceptable to Sun who wrote this license
in order to protect itself and do other lawyerly things.
On the flipside, GPL->CDDL is equally hair-raising.
Linux code would similarly have to dual-license or
use a weaker license. Would the CDDL terms be an
acceptable release condition for Linux kernel software?
Probably not, because CDDL allows combinations with
closed-source code. That would allow the linux kernel to
be combined with closed-source code also. The two licenses
exist under two different ideologies and two different
commercial realities. The licenses are reflective of that.

When it comes down to it, when can't agree on a license you can't
work together at the code level. Anyone who writes a new license
by definition can't agree with anyone else on the license issue.
That person or organisation can't share code with anybody but
their own forks. When you have large cornerstone open source
tools in the same technical arena that can't agree I think we
lose something significant. When gnome can't use QT because it's
GPL and that doesn't fit philosophically with their world view
(let alone the C/C++ language issue), I think we've lost
something. When Solaris and Linux kernels, or Linux and BSD
kernels can't work together because of ideology and legality
I think we've lost something. I guess it just reflect the real
melting pot of loosely-coupled communities that open source
represents.

What I am really looking forward to is the possible open
sourcing of Java. In the java meme-space there is no reason
to use an established license. CDDL would be perfect for the
job (assuming it passes debian's tests) because there is no
alternative open source offering that Sun's version could
usefully exchange source code with (except maybe Mono?).
I hope that the talk about open sourcing Java will lead to
the same place that Solaris is at now. If it does, maybe
I'll be able to stop relying so much on C++ and Python :)

-- 
Benjamin Carlyle <benjamincarlyle at optusnet.com.au>