| Will OpenSolaris and Linux soon be trading code? |
Jan. 31, 2006
Sun Microsystems puzzles me sometimes.
Take, for instance, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz's recent announcement that Sun might dual-license Solaris under its own CDDL (Community Development and Distribution License) and the GPL 3 (General Public License version 3).
OK, I'll bite, "Why?"
Schwartz said, "We want to do what we can to drive more efficiency and cross-pollination between Linux and OpenSolaris."
I'll buy that. My question is "Why didn't you just put Solaris under GPL 2 in the first place?"
Everyone, and I mean everyone, knew when Sun opened Solaris under the CDDL that it was incompatible with GPL 2.
Sun didn't do GPL 2, though, because, as Scott McNealy said last year at the Sun Network Computing meeting last year, "Sun has an obligation to its shareholders to leverage and protect its intellectual property. We are granting [access to our intellectual property] to people who are responsible and who are signed-up licensees of the CDDL."
Fair enough, Sun has stockholders and many of them and Sun's own employees still aren't that sure about open-source. But, as I said at the time, Sun wasn't really looking at Solaris in an open-source way.
Sun has changed some since then. The company even has a Chief Open Source Officer, Simon Phipps these days. There is no question in my mind that Sun is a lot more open-source friendly in 2006 than it was in 2005.
But that said, when my colleague Peter Galli talked with Sun's Tom Goguen, Sun's vice president of software marketing, Goguen said that Solaris could never work with GPL 2 code.
"We wanted to enable as broad a development community as possible around Solaris, and one part of that is being able to prescribe what you can and cannot do with the code, what other code you can combine with it, and exactly how to do it," said Goguen.
In addition, Goguen objected to the "all-or-nothing scenario under the current GPL, which also says nothing about patents, and I'm not sure how far the next version will go there."
OK, I think I understand. But still, why exactly did Sun find the GPL 2 unacceptable? To find out, I rang up Phipps to get his take.
First, Phipps pointed out that Solaris going under the GPL 3 is not a done deal.
It all depends on how the compatibility language in GPL v3 works out. We considered GPL v2 for Solaris but couldn't use it because key code was not able to be opened right away (maybe at all) and we needed to be able to pragmatically mix licensing in the interim," said Phipps. "If GPL v3 allows a more pragmatic license mix as seems likely it may work for us."
He continued: "In addition, and more philosophically, we don't want to dual license under licenses that are not equivalent in their intent," meaning that when Sun dual-licenses, the two licenses need to cover the important objectives for the community involved. Take patents, for example, the "lack of a patent assignment in GPL v2 means people could circumvent the patent pooling if they opt for GPL, but the patent grant in GPL v3 looks good, even if the patent piece is a bit thin."
Of course, if Linux stays under the GPL 2, and that's certainly what Torvalds wants right now, all of Sun's thoughts about marrying Linux and Solaris code will all be moot.
"I made it clear, back at launch time,'" said Phipps, "that we couldn't use GPL 2 because the source licensing in Solaris was too diverse. It's really not even an option, although we did explore it."
Still, it's early days in the development of the GPL 3; it may yet change into something that Torvalds can bless. If that happens, we may still see Linux and Solaris trading code.
--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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