[Fwd: Re: [H-GEN] Solaris 10 give away]

[Benjamin Carlyle]

I'll try keep this brief by limiting the license debate which we have
had before. I think we can agree to disagree on that point, and I hold
my ground for now on the CDDL (and MPL) not being widely understood and
not having seen sufficient exploration in a court of law :) I know you
hold differing opinions.

On Sun, 2007-01-21 at 22:19 +1100, McBofh wrote:
> Now on to other matters. You appear to be approaching
> the "Solaris 10 is free" and "OpenSolaris is free"
> concepts from the viewpoint of the GPLv2, wherein
> nothing except full GPLv2 compliance allows something
> to be called "free."
> I disagree with you on that.

I don't make that claim. I am happy enough to avoid pointing the gun in
the direction of open solaris. I think this community deserves another
five years or so to run before any kind of judgement is passed either
pro or con. I am quite happy to indicate the inflexibility of (Closed)
Solaris licensing for useful functions and leave it at that. It is only
the cross-linking between the two in popular media that I think leads to
confusion.

I think that confusion is stoked by representatives of Sun who are
trying to frame and promote Solaris in terms of Open Solaris. They do
this because they see Linux (or Redhat) as the competition and want to
be able to claim the same freedom benefits for their operating system.
They want to claim long term viability, community support, freedom to
modify, ability for customer self-maintenence. Implicitly they seem to
be saying that solaris is either free or becoming free. Perhaps the
"becoming" is an accurate account, but we are not there yet. Those
benefits do not seem to exist for Sun's customers today.

> There are two main reasons why parts of OpenSolaris
> can be restricted to the "closed bins" part of the
> distribution. The first is that Sun's legal teams have
> not finalised their review of that code and therefore
> are legally unable to give the ok to release said code
> to the world. The second - as you are no doubt aware -
> is that the Solaris environment includes source which
> is licensed under CDA or NDA from third parties. These
> third parties are generally IHVs which are incredibly
> reluctant to allow any hardware-specific code out into
> the wild, since they generally view such code as their
> corporate crown jewels.

I quite understand the difficulty. I also appreciate the significance of
Solaris giving away their hard-built sources. I don't favour software
patents, but I do feel that copyright is something worth respecting. I
expect the copyright owner to be able to make decisions about what
freedoms are granted to people using the fruits of their labour. My
argument isn't that solaris is bad, nor that they should behave
differently for any moral reason. My argument is simply that the main
solaris branch is not currently free enough to obtain the long-term
maintainability features that I am currently looking for in an operating
system.

> You also said:
> ==========================================================
> Sun seem to be trying to get mileage out of the fact that
> open solaris is free (as in speech) to promote the main
> solaris branch. They seem to be trying to position Solaris
> as an alternative to linux as an operating system that
> is viable in the long term, supported by a significant
> community, and able to be used in environments where code
> inspection and the ability for customers to understand
> and fix problems is important.
> ==========================================================
> Now I'm confused here. Is your complaint that Sun hasn't
> released Solaris as OpenSolaris under GPLv2?
> Are you worried that there might indeed be viable non-linux
> operating systems which people and companies might choose
> to use? What I see as a subtext to your comment above is
> fear of competition. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I think I failed to add something like "Unfortunately, these benefits
are not currently available despite present hype". I am neither
pro-competition or anti-competition in the operating system space. I
don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the formation of two
communities who are both attempting to build the best operating system
on the planet. Neither would I see anything fundamentally wrong with
those two communities settling their differences (license, community
structure, etc) and working towards the common goal using shared
resources.

For the moment the market appears to be supporting the two (well,
obviously more than two) as separate entities. I'm sure that the
pendulum will swing backwards and forwards many times before the
generation is born that will wonder why the question as to which way to
go was ever asked.

Benjamin