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Sun Considers dual-sourcing Solaris Under GPL3

Posted by Hemos on from the what-would-the-impact-be dept.

foorilious writes "In his blog, Sun Microsystem's President and COO Jonathan Schwartz discusses the possibility of dual-licensing Solaris (and perhaps the rest of their software suite) under GPLv3, in addition to the CDDL, which is the OSI-approved license under which these products are already available, but generally considered to be incompatible with the GPL at some level. Though this could mean an opening of the floodgates to a lot of sharing between Linux and Solaris (among other things), it's worth mentioning that Schwartz has speculated on exciting things in the past (such as porting Solaris to IBM's Power) that we subsequently never heard another thing about."

2 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Floodgates are shut by TheRaven64 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    When he talks about sharing with Linux, he means developers, not code. And when he says about sharing he means poaching. Quite a few people code for Linux rather than the BSDs because they like having a restrictive license which prevents their code being used by parasites. If Solaris goes GPLv3 and Linux doesn't then this may influence some of them to switch to Solaris development. If Solaris can cream off some of the better Linux developers then it could become very interesting.

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  2. Re:Sharing with Linux? by david.gilbert · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    They know Linux won't be able to get any Solaris tech due to Linux being stuck at GPL2, and get to score brownie points with GPL-lovers.

    I agree. I think that Linus has made an important strategic error here (in not trusting the FSF to "do the right thing" with future versions of the GPL). Oh well, nobody's perfect.