Sun's Schwartz Attacks GPL

jskelly writes "Sun Micro President Jonathan Schwartz attacked the GPL at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco yesterday.Other than the same old arguments (you can't make it proprietary later) he adds that it imposes on developing nations "a rather predatory obligation to disgorge all their IP back to the wealthiest nation in the world" -- but fails to mention that the converse is also true: the wealthiest nation in the world is similarly, under the GPL, forced to "disgorge all its IP back to the developing nations" as well. Duh!"

Comments

Re:Nothing wrong with hating the GPL...

[tarponbill]

" Just don't use GPL'd code and write it all yourself."

Yep that's the ticket -- Use OpenSolaris instead.

Don't you just love it when the Linux Bigots think ecveryone should be in business to give away all they develop with their money.

We switched to OpenSolaris. It's great. Some day, the Linux crowd will see the light, but probably be too late.

Wonder why the Mozilla foundation isn't attacked the way Sun is, they use the same license.

So tell me again why should I spend my money developing software and just give it away?

Re:Christ Schwartz has some balls

[SunFan]

By 'people', I mean the political party forming around Slashdot.

The pro IBM stance here is partly due to a patent dump of very debatable utility, but Slashdot cheers like teenage girls at a boy band concert. Yet Sun builds up the patent base in OpenSolaris with real legal analysis and backing and Slashdot gives them the finger.

How can Slashdot be so pro GPL, yet be so pro Apple (non-GPL Darwin + big proprietary layer)? Does the pretty packaging and UI mean that much? Does it mean nothing that Sun is _less_proprietary_ than Apple, by a huge margin?

How can Slashdot be so pro "freedom" when they verbally abuse anyone genuinely exercising that freedom? Sun is navigating their business needs and what their customers want and came up with the CDDL+OpenSolaris approach. Yet Slashdot has few nice things to say.

It just makes no sense. I really wonder if 90% of Slashdot are people still in college who don't work nor have families nor real responsibility beyond next week's exam. I also wonder if 90% of Slashdot have egos so fragile that a single dirty look by a stranger would send them into a month-long depression. My advice: grow up and get over the fact that the real world is bigger and more diverse than your world.