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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.'"
I agree. Solaris is a very much more polished than Linux is. There's plenty of documentation for it. A real, real LVM, and Veritas is always an option. No longer do you have to run Solaris on Sun hardware. Get yourself an x86, and fire it up. As the parent said, OSS developers should dump Linux for Solaris.
There's pissing contests all over. OSS is just another one.
Maybe Microsoft has a hand in this. This could be part of a anti-Linux strategy. (Is Bill Gates in bed with Sun's management team?) First they let Sun open-license everything. (Bill does whatever Sun management wants.) In a few years, Microsoft may decide that it's had enough of this cross-licensing crap and say tell Sun to block everything. (Probably by blackmailing Sun management with incriminating photos).
Just a guess. Everything sounds tgtbt.