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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.'"
How am I supposed to RTFA when the summary alone fills my entire browser window!
This is a bug in the draft licence which sun is actively working on. It won't be a problem in the final version. For some reason the summary forgot to mention that...
Summary: There is a bug in the draft of the licence. With any luck it will be fixed when the licence is released.
Of course corps are going to use licenses as weapons. They've been doing it for-fucking-ever, why would they stop in open source? Open source companies (like mine) compete hard. Companies that do have legal advantages and the resources to use them, will.
The cool thing is that we've shifted the landscape, and now these battles are about "how open are you" questions.
This isn't to say that everyone should fawn on closed source companies opening, on the contrary- ride them hard! But recognize where we are - one battle down, two or three to go.
What would RMS do?
This licensing/contract cr*p has become has gone too far.
Where is the ironic tag when you need it.
I expect they would prefer to release under the GPL. The only additional freedom of BSD is not to reciprocate!
But admittedly as a user (that is, when looking for others' code to use) I look for the BSD or other nonrestrictive license. Allow people to leech and they certainly will!
Just yesterday, I was thinking about what Sun has in mind with this OpenSolaris thing and CDDL.
I remembered the Microsoft/Sun settlement deal, and the stream of Sun's conflicting messages on open source, Java, ...etc.
I am not a tinfoil guy at all, but could not help thinking about Microsoft 's deal influencing/directing/shaping Sun's decision to have its own sub-world of Open Source that would not allow innovations outside this sub-universe.
Bruce Perens has confirmed with Sun that this is the case.
Now, the question is, did Microsoft influence it/order it? I hope it is not the case. Why Sun? Why?
Sun is an example of a fall from grace: from being the darling of the open source community (Java, ...etc.) to sleeping with the enemy. IBM is the contrary, it has redeemed itself from being a monopolistic, arrogant behemoth to a major player in open source now.
P.S. I am under no illusion of simplistic "IBM is bad" and "Sun/Redhat are bad". These assessments change and morph over time, and companies, like people, and nations have their ups and downs.
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A few comments on the valid points:
+ Linux took off mainly because of shitty x86 platform support and pricing from Sun and other UNIX vendors
This is very much true, the status of the UNIX:es for so long was what gave space for Linux to grow to what it is now.
+ Solaris is a technically superior Unix kernel to Linux and always has been
Traditionally been, very true, technically superior now is more depatable, but in any case today the differences are more that one is better at one thing and other at other.
One of the real weaknesses of Solaris is made very clear even in SUN:s own marketing where they say say that Solaris is guaranteed to run on over 275 Systems. That is, the driver support is still quite limited.
I mean, even Linux is very limited in driver support and one has to be carefull in buying hardware, but Solaris is way behind.
On the other hand features like Dtrace are things that Solaris is ahead in.
That's right. This guy placed himself voluntarily on the same side of the spam wars as the spammers who committed massive DoS attacks against major DNSBLs, leading to the loss of some of the most useful ones. On the same side as the other spammers who sued Spamhaus, one of the single most effective anti-spam resources in the world, in an effort to intimidate its operators into silence.
No, I'm not misquoting him. He didn't say "make DNSBLs obsolete" or "stop spammers with other tools so effective, that nobody needs or wants to use DNSBLs". He said to get them shut down.
The guy had one bad run-in with a DNSBL operator after users reported his commercial, ad-sponsored email "newsletter" was being sent out as spam to people who never wanted it. So he decides that all DNSBLs need to be censored, and stands up in front of a bunch of guys at MIT and makes fun of the DNSBL operator for acting like a nerd on Usenet. Oh, that went over well. Utter shocked silence: "Who is this bozo, and who told him he knew anything about stopping spam?"
After the conference, I looked up his column. Nothing else he had to say was any more worth listening to. This guy does not actually know one thing about anything technical, or about the social implications of the things he discusses or his own moronic proposals.
For all his rough edges, the simple truth is RMS is right about the GPL and technology. Freedom matters, and it is an end in itself unlike technology and wealth which are a means.
Sun doesn't want linux to benefit from any solaris technology. They would have never made their license BSDL for that reason. Ironically due to the way the license is written neither can freebsd.
Maybe that's what's wrong with the BSD license. Sun took BSD code, added stuff to it and now makes it impossible for BSD to gain any benefit.
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The summary demonstrates just how complex and extremely difficult the whole IP issue is to comprehend. This demonstrated complexity is another reason why temporary granting of monopolies through the use of IP laws should be limited to ten years. When the legal arguments begin to take the form such that one person alone cannot possibly comprehend what is going on, how is a judge going to be able to make an honest and correct decision. What is going to happen when the complexity of these laws is so great that even a team of judges can not make an informed and honest decision.
Does it go on forever?
It is immature for GPL advocates to get all up-in-arms about the CDDL. Be happy that their is yet another big OSS project in the mix, rather than bitch about "wah, we can't cherry pick Sun's technology for ourselves." OpenSolaris, Linux, *BSD, etc. will all exist in parallel quite naturally. They compete only as brothers, with the common foe being Microsoft.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
To be honest, I came from the opposite side of the spectrum where I begged upper managment to listen to me when I told them that a few of these cheap linux x86 servers can do more than that big expensive sun server. Of course, I often just got the blow off while they went out and wined and dined with their Sun rep.
Well, a few years later, the dot.com crashed - and they decided that it was better to try Linux than to be gung ho on Sun till the point of bankruptcy. Well guess what. Those cheap linux boxes could do more than those Sun servers that cost 10 times as much. And even more, they turned out to be just as reliable and supportable without a platinum sun contract. (have you ever priced one of those).
Too bad Sun was so jealous of MS that they couldn't accept the Linux thing until it was too late. In fact, it still seems they can't accept it - it seems like they feel it's better to be in a Sun+Microsoft only world than a Linux world too.
Basically they've quite deliberately (under the pretence of removing an overly "burdensome" section of the license) inserted a loophole that they can exploit. Developers working under the CDDL just have to trust that Sun are "good" and working under their best interests.
I'm not sure I trust Sun the way they hope that the community trusts them. Even though IBM's 500 patent donation (just looking at quantity, not quality) is smaller, I think it's more significant to the open source movement. Only when Sun legally bind themselves for our trust like IBM has will I start trusting them.
The EPL doesn't stop IBM's donation of the original Eclipse source from "leaking" into competitor's products. In fact, the EPL has enabled many vendors to build products which directly compete against IBM's offerings. It is also important to note that in the case of Eclipse there is an independent non-profit organization which develops the code -- hence the E in EPL.
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Especially if one compares the Solaris system to the GNU system, technically superior might not be as good as flexible and usefull. I admit that I am a command line commando and I like lots of command line switches and options. In my experience, the GNU operating system utilities are the best to be had. Perhaps they don't run fully optimized, but doing exactly what you need at any speed is better than not doing what you need at high performance levels.
Sun's obvious plan here is to use the Solaris Unix kernel and bolster Solaris with more feature-rich GNU-derived utilities. Their open source initiative is their "right" to justly use and incorporate the bulk of GNU into the arms of their Solaris operating system.
It's a good idea for them, and they are acting on it while the iron is hot. Solaris can benefit from all the great GNU software as first-class packages rather than /usr/local slipshod type upgrades.
I would presume that the Solaris UNIX kernel is indeed technically superior to the Linux kernel when running on Sun hardware, but I think that I will continue to run the Linux kernel on my non-Sun machines. I know that if the license is compatible enough, Debian will soon make a Debian GNU/Solaris which boots the Solaris kernel into a Debian userland (on Sun hardware). That seems to be the way of it.
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> because Solaris is a technically superior
> operating system
What makes you say this? do you have actual examples of how solaris is superior to linux ?
as far as i can tell, the main advantage of solaris was that it ran on sun's big-ass servers. Now that we can get the same performance out of a 2-way AMD64 machine as out of 64-way e10k this doesn't matter anymore.
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Patents, already covered. Sun may at ANY time, due to loopholes in the license, close down everybody else distributing and working on "OpenSolaris". Besides, THEY own all YOUR changes (slave-license). In GPL ONLY YOU OWN YOUR OWN CHANGES (unless you donate it to the FSF).
OpenSolaris has a license incompatible with the FSF (Free Software License). While TONS of other licenses are indeed compatible with FSF and the GPL: Check it out..
Seeing your nick, you're a troll. This is not for you, but for those you might mislead.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
There is nothing wrong with BSD license. It's quite simply a free license. Perhaps copycenter describes BSDL best :
What a petty and misguided attack on Bruce.
Bruce's analysis and instincts about this issue are right on target.
Something very bad is going on at Sun... management is consistently posturing and conniving, rather than focusing on producing value. As a reluctant stockholder of Sun, I'm concerned. As a spectator, I'm disgusted. I almost have more respect for the SCO people... because I don't really believe that SCO management is deluded enough to think that what they're doing is anything but a naked grab for money. Sun thinks it's on a holy mission.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I work for a company that has a cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft. One of our lawyers explained that if we write code that infringes on a Microsoft patent, we're covered. But Microsoft insisted on an exclusion for Open Source. If we use an OS product that infringes, the cross-license agreement does not apply; they can come after us and our customers.