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Sun Grants Access to 1,600+ Patents
Insane_zoD writes "Looks like Sun is attempting to keep up with IBM in opening up patents for FOSS-based projects. From the news release: 'By giving open source developers free access to Sun OpenSolaris related patents under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), the company is fostering open innovation and establishing a leadership role in the framework of a patent commons that will be recognized across the globe.'"
So what we have here is software that is essentially free in just about any way you'd like to describe it. In general, the only thing that is different between this license and the BSD license is that you are not allowed to make a profit on the sale of any software you develop and you may not close the source.
The not closing the source is what the GPL is most interested in. Unfortunately, I think that just because the owner of the patents is not releasing them under the GPL, the GNU/FSF folks aren't going to be so willing to accept this as "True" free software.
Even though it is for all intents and purposes.
I was under the understanding that the CDDL wasn't GPL compatible (or at least there were some issues...please correct me if I'm wrong, since I'm not looking at the license right now). If this is the case, is there really any reason to care about this development?
and I really didn't like their take on linux at times, but I have to say overall I'm really impressed with this company.
Though again the license not being gpl compatible (afaik) is really a sore point, Sun is making a significant contribution to the open source movement with opensourcing solaris and putting patents in the public domain.
And also let's not forget that they in a sense gave us openoffice, a software that imho is largely responsible for making Linux a real contender for the desktop.
So to put it briefly, thank you Sun, your efforts are really appreciated though they are of course not perfect.
RTFLicense. This code cannot be used in Linux, as any derivative works must remain licensed under Sun's CDDL, and any derivatives of GPL software must be licensed under the GPL. The 2 are fundamentally incompatible, deliberately.
As for SCO, Sun signed a license with them last year in the run up to this release, which should make any Linux developer very wary of even looking at this codebase.
SCO also hold zero patents...
The answer seems to be that the license gives developers the right to make derivatives of the Open Solaris code, with permission to use these patents in the derivative works.
All changes must be given back to Sun, and if your Open Source project doesn't use their code you don't have a license to use these patents.
You're therefore not allowed to use the GPL for any project which uses the patents!
I should add that even though section 13 has been removed, that does not prevent the author of a piece of software to release his/her code under the CDDL and GPL simulateneously. Authors can release their own work under as many licenses as they want. Dual-licensing is still possible, but not mentioned explicitely in the license. This has the disadvantage that any derivative works are likely to "forget" one of the licenses, unless all contributions are explicitely dual-licensed.
I will grant Sun the benefit of the doubt and assume that their lawyers did not think that section 13 was necessary and that it could cause more problems than it solves. Only paranoid people would think that it was removed in order to make it less likely that some work would be dual-licensed with the CDDL and GPL.
Anyway, this is not very important for the current discussion because:
-Raphaël