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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."

5 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. To summarize... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "We fear Linux so we want to be incompatable.

    We announced a great $2-billion we-both-respect-IP deal with Microsoft, and the F/OSS guys won't be giving us $2 billion soon.

    How do we write a license that keeps Microsoft happy and trys as well as we can to divide and conquor the Linux developer base."

  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 Waldmeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's not GPL-compatible.

      Yes, the Apache license is also considered incompatible with the GPL, and the Apache webserver is still the dominant webserver. And I never heard RMS rant about that, and demand writing an Apache replacement under the GPL.

      PHP is also licensed under an GPL-incompatible license. Still remember the mess with MySQL? When they relicened their client libraries from LGPL to GPL, because they wanted to urge more companies to buy commercial MySQL licenses, they had to issue an "Optional GPL License Exception for PHP". Otherwise they would have been replaced by many sites with competing projects like Postgres available under a more liberal license. Does this mess (and the commercial interest behind it) help free software or the community?

      When Sun released OpenOffice under a dual license, some companies like Ximian or Redhat refused to license their changes under both licenses, they released them only under the GPL. So the patches found never their way to openoffice.org and today every distribution patches their own version of OpenOffice. Did this help open source or the community?

      These are only a few points to show that the GPL is not the only OSS license. Sun has contributed a lot of code, so they have made probably more experiences with OSS licenses than most other people and companies. Is it really so hard to understand, that they see issues and don't simply hail RMS and the GPL?

  3. 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

  4. Re:MPL-style license? try LGPL. by WebMink · · Score: 5, Informative

    Assuming you are referring to my blog entry discussing the way that the success, not failure, of MPL-style licenses is at the root of the license proliferation problem, I'm afraid I don't agree with you. LGPL does not include the explicit patent grant that the MPL includes, nor does it establish ground rules for maintaining a patent peace, and thus does not serve as the archetype for MPL licenses and their (many) derivatives. Instead it includes an exception to the scope of the GPL which depends on the language and architecture of the software in use and makes assumptions on how dynamic linking will take place. In all other respects it is the same as my third license category, GPL licenses.