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CDDL Project Leader on the CDDL

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the plus-it's-cool-to-make-new-licenses dept.

SunFan writes "Claire Giordano, Sun's lead on CDDL development, gives the inside story on how the new license was developed. She discusses how people within Sun debated the various licenses, including the GPL, and shows why the GPL, BSD, and MPL licenses were found to come up short in meeting the needs of Sun's broad customer and developer base."

14 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. MPL-style license? try LGPL. by ebyrob · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What the author of "Failed as in succeeded wildly." meant was LGPL-style licenses. LGPL has been around a lot longer than MPL and actually fits what he describes.

  2. Real Problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's not GPL-compatible. I appreciate you want to be able to mix in proprietary code. If you need that, you can do one of two things. You can use LGPL, or you can include a clause "May also be sublicensed under the GPL, version 2.0 or newer." The only thing you lose is the patent litigation protection. You can also grant yourselves rights to change the main CDCL without alienating the mainstream FLOSS community.

    Either way, a large number of people, for whatever reasons, distrust Sun. Releasing under a license that is widely percieved to be incompatible with the greater free software community is fanning those flames. Most people percieve this as a simply ploy to make it impossible to move code back and forth between the Linux kernel and Solaris. That's not really big on freedom.

    One of the great parts of free software is rapid development. About half of my apps are built by glueing together code from other people's programs. Making Solaris not compatible with the GPL breaks that, and it's not good for building a developer community around Solaris.

    I wish you guys the best of luck, but I think that given a GPL-incompatible license, you'll have a really hard time building a large developer community.

    With a GPL-compatible license, if Solaris got to be better than Linux, virtually no one would think twice about switching from Debian GNU/Linux to Debian GNU/Solaris.

    Also, notice the trend. Virtually everyone (Netscape, TrollTech, etc.) starts with their own crappy license, and eventually, switches to a dual-licensing model that includes GPL. Follow the lesson, and start off on the GPL side from the start.

    1. Re:Real Problem by hacker · · Score: 4, Interesting
      "Non-GPL code becomes GPL. It's like an irreversible chemical reaction, unless you happen to own the copyright to all the code to begin with."

      I hear this "viral" kool-aid all the time regarding the GPL, and I do find it funny every time it comes up. The GPL is not viral. Repeat that to yourself. Call the FSF and ask them.. No really, go ahead, I'll hold.

      I know this intimately, because we're fighting a GPL case now (4+ years and counting) against a company that took our code, removed our names, called it their own and ship it without the license, including linking parts of it to their own products. We're FSF-backed (they've appointed us an incredible attorney), and we've gone over every angle of this hundreds of times.

      If the "if it touches the GPL, it must be GPL" FUD was real, do you truly think companies like Oracle, VMware, and thousands of others would deploy their binary-only products on Linux, which links to... guess what, tools, libraries, userspace programs covered under either the GPL or the LGPL.

      It goes like this. Watch carefully now:

      1. You write a proprietary product
      2. You want to add a feature, so you take some GPL code and add it to your proprietary product
      3. Author of the GPL code finds that you are using his code, and requests one of two things:
        1. The full source code to the pieces that link or modified his code, or...
        2. That you no longer have the rights to use his code in your proprietary product
      4. Your rights to continue to use the code under the GPL are immediately revoked.

      At this point, you are no longer covered by the GPL license, and any further use of the GPL code is now a United States Copyright Violation (and possibly a Lanham Act violation, which is defined as "...false designation of origin").

      So to get yourself out of this mess, you have a few options, all of which require that you stop using the GPL code in your product (well, except one; see below). There is no way to continue to use GPL code in a violating way, period. Many people believe you just pay a fine and business goes on, but it doesn't work like that. You're still guilty of the violation.

      1. Settle with the developer for an undisclosed fee, a fine.
      2. Go to court, and let the judge decide what your penalties are (US Copyright violations carry anywhere from $20k to $200k in fines, per-incident). They'll most-likely issue a blanket settlement in the sub-million dollar range, because its hard to determine "damages" of GPL code when its given away freely, and downloaded/shared all over the place.
      3. Encourage the developer to relicense the code to you under a non-GPL license

      Again, at no point does YOUR PRODUCT somehow become GPL code. It just doesn't happen, ever. There isn't one single precendent of this happening, because that's not how GPL violations are handled.

      So please, in the future, do some research, read the GPL (actually READ it), and call the FSF or the EFF if you wish, and find out the real facts. Stop spreading FUD, you're only making the problem worse for yourself.

  3. Lame Excuse by sbszine · · Score: 3, Interesting

    From TFA: On Day 1 of OpenSolaris, because some OpenSolaris IP is encumbered by other companies (example - 3rd party drivers), we're going to have some source files in the kernel that will remain proprietary. Hence GPL was out of the running.

    The whole point of opening the source and creating a community is so that people can develop the things they need, free of the problems proprietary code brings. I find it hard to believe that much Solaris kernel code belongs to anyone other than Sun.

    Linux started out with very few drivers, but now supports most common hardware. Sometimes this support takes the form of binary or wrapped drivers, but that hasn't prevented Linux from remaining under the GPL.

    This is just more of the usual Sun guff.

    --

    Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling

  4. Re:And what lame excuses they used by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why not do the same thing as the Linux community, and release it without those drivers until someone writes an open-source replacement.

    Because, ultimately, no one gives a rat's ass about a proprietary driver. If it works, that's great. If it's open source, well, that's nice, but working is better.

  5. Re:Wow were SUN by SunFan · · Score: 2, Interesting


    What about OpenSolaris implies lock-in, and who modded this insightful? In fact, there was a mention at Blastwave that some people are interested in a PowerPC port of OpenSolaris. That's on top of all the x86 hardware it runs on, along with all the SPARC hardware.

    --
    -- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
  6. Re:Is the License Half-Open or Half-Closed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The CDDL is Free, at least according to the FSF. Check their site.

  7. Re:Wow were SUN by Martin+Marvinski · · Score: 5, Interesting

    OpenSolaris is completely open! You can create your own OpenSolaris Distro! Casper H. S. Dik, one of the OpenSolaris community advisory board members talks more about the CDDL. He basically states the CDDL is the MPL without some of the restrictions..

    An example he gives is the right for the Mozilla foundation to revoke the MPL and the requirement to have lawsuits settled in California (which would be bad for international users). That is why SUN didn't use the MPL.

    SUN enginner Alan Coopersmith points out in comp.unix.solaris that anyone can create an OpenSolaris distro.

    http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.unix.so la ris/search?group=comp.unix.solaris&q=Alan+Coopersm ith+cheapbytes+Opensolaris&qt_g=1&searchnow=Search +this+group

  8. Re:Wow were SUN by Martin+Marvinski · · Score: 3, Interesting

    One more thing. Joerg Schilling, famous for creating Linux's cdrecord program is creating his own OpenSolaris Distro called SchilliX. http://schillix.berlios.de/ Blastwave.org, a website that contains free software for Solaris users is also creating an OpenSolaris distro according to the regulars of the usenet group comp.unix.solaris. A benefit of OpenSolaris is that it will have a proper cdrecord functionality. Again SUN Engineer and OpenSolaris community advisory board member Casper H. S. Dik says this about OpenSolaris compared to linux. In message ID Casper Dik writes: "I think [Joerg Schilling (author of cdrecord)] prefers neither but rather has a proper USCSI interface; note that this isn't really a "IDE SCSI" emulation layer; ATAPI is SCSI-over-ATA. " The problem with the linux kernel is that a scan by cdrecord may not find all of your cdrecord devices because of the changes in the 2.6 kernel. Even Alan Cox mentioned that it was not optimal in one of the long linux.kernel threads. :-)

  9. Questionable OSI Approval by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you follow the debate over the CDDL in the OSI mailing list, you'll notice that the OSI seemed to approve the license pretty quickly. There were many licenses waiting for approval that were submitted earlier, yet were never approved. Doesn't that seem odd?

    Could it be that Sun paid off members of the OSI community to push their license through?

    http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3:mss:91 35

    http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3:mss:91 37

    Hmmmmm..... interesting.

  10. Re:Is the License Half-Open or Half-Closed? by TorKlingberg · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's not "Free" by the Free Software Foundation.

    From http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/license-list .html

    "Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)
    This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL."

    I don't like CDDL either, but it IS a free software license.

  11. cddl might not be the biggest problem by lanc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...but have a look at the http://opensolaris.org/ site:

    Soon, you'll be able to download the OpenSolaris distribution. For now -- just to prove that we're serious -- we've made available the source code to DTrace; it's available here under the CDDL License.
    sure. This stands on that page since months or so. Where is the code?
    --
    "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
  12. CDDL IS a Free Software license by scarhill · · Score: 2, Interesting
    No, you're mistaken. According to FSF,
    [The CDDL] is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL.
    Because it's incompatible with the GPL, they urge developers not to use it, but it definitely is a free software license.
  13. Only because Linus doesn't sue by Chemisor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > Sometimes this support takes the form of binary or wrapped
    > drivers, but that hasn't prevented Linux from remaining under the GPL.

    Binary drivers are technically a violation of the GPL because they link into a GPL executable. Such linking normally requires all involved components to be GPL. Fortunately, Linus is not objecting much to this, so Linux is doing just fine. If Linux were being developed by Richard Stallman, however, it wouldn't have lasted a day.