[H-GEN] re: OpenSolaris

Benjamin Carlyle benjamincarlyle at optusnet.com.au
Fri Feb 11 22:21:52 EST 2005


On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 09:15 +1100, James C. McPherson wrote:
> ...
> http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/Gregp/
> Don't forget also that there's a pretty comprehensive
> licensing FAQ @ http://opensolaris.org/faq/licensing_faq.html

Interesting...
So I guess this brings me back around to my original thinking on the
topic. Clearly my thinking had become confused at some point. For a
while I was thinking about the MPL and the CPL and CDDL, and I suppose
by implication the LGPL with their combination permission and wondering
what exactly the combination looks like. Somehow it clicked in my head
that the combination was too strange to be possible at all. I was
thinking that by using a CDDL library in an otherwise GPL program that
you had to "make the CDDL part GPL". On reflection that is clearly not
the case.

So, what's the truth? If I do create a program with all of these
components, I suppose I end up with a license like this overall:
"""Parts of this program are distributed under the terms of the MPL,
CPL, CDDL, LGPL, and MyOwnPersonalLicense. See MPL.txt, CPL.txt, CDDL,
LGPL, and MyOwnPersonalLicense.txt for details."""

In the source I would need to clearly identify the license associated
with each component.

Alternatively, it might be (but is probably not) possible to write a
"compatible" (as in GPL-compatible) license. That affords all of the
rights of each license to the end user without breaching the terms of
any. Either way its complication. I can just see a user doing a
click-through of the terms of each license before being allowed to run
your program for the first time.

My main concerns about having multiple non-GPL licenses are weakened by
this sledgehammer of illumination, but they still exist. I still see the
introduction of each new open source license as a vile sin. What Sun
should have been doing instead is attempting to use or create a new
version of an existing license. The most important thing as far as I am
concerned is that Sun gets more than just Sun on board with this new
license. I have no objections to the CDDL if it is one of three or four
common open source license. As it is, I just don't see it becoming one
of the top three any time soon. Get mozilla.org on board with the new
license. Get IBM on board. Then we can talk. Until then, drop the C and
call it the "Sun Development and Distribution License".

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





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