Sun's Patent and Licensing Practices Examined

RMX writes "Groklaw has an excellent analysis of some Patent Questions About the CDDL. For /.ers who don't like reading a lot, the most important point is that 'it would be possible for developers co-developing Open Solaris to someday find themselves blocked from distributing code by a Microsoft patent infringement claim, while leaving Sun, because of their cross-licensing deal with Microsoft, free to continue to distribute the contributed code.' The article also notes that 'The short answer why [some particular clause] is needed in the CDDL and not the GPL is that Linus Torvalds has not just entered into a cross-licensing arrangement with Microsoft, the relevant details of which are not public'. Makes you wonder what those relevant details are?" And reader rudy_wayne writes "David Berlind's column Will Sun's 1600 patents suck the life out of Linux? talks about Sun's open sourcing of Solaris 10 and the problems that occur due to the fact that so many open source licenses are incompatible with each other. One of his most important points is 'when a large company -- IBM, Sun, or anyone else-- donates code to the open source community with a one-off license, like the Eclipse Public License (IBM) or the CDDL (Sun) it gives those companies a way to donate their code to the open source community, which in turn can enhance it to the benefactor's advantage, without that code leaking into a competitor's product (with a non-reciprocating license) in such a way that it can be used against the benefactor.'"

Comments

Jealosy

[Anonymous Coward]

Facts:
+ Solaris is a technically superior Unix kernel to Linux and always has been
+ Linux took off mainly because of shitty x86 platform support and pricing from Sun and other UNIX vendors

Everyone in the Linux community knows it, but it's been true for so long that nobody is prepared for a cheap x86-friendly, open source Solaris. Their deep-down fear is that Sun will gain community and developer support and be a credible competitor for Linux.

However, this group is unwilling or incapable of admitting this, so instead you get a bunch of reactionary license nipickery and people crying because Sun hurt their feelings in a blogpost.

The truth is that this ideology about "freedom" and "open source" is mostly just thin cover for rampant OS Fanboyism. Sun can "get it" all they want, but the Linux Zealots will always find fault, because they've tied what little self-worth they have into the OS that runs their webserver.