Sun Considers dual-sourcing Solaris Under GPL3

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."

Comments

Sharing with Linux?

[confusion]

I thought Linux wasn't going to go for GPL3, so how exactly would that sharing work?

Jerry
http://www.networkstrike.com/

Re:Sharing with Linux?

[nurhussein]

I thought Linux wasn't going to go for GPL3, so how exactly would that sharing work?

I suspect that's the reason for the sudden change of heart. 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.

Re:Sharing with Linux?

[CastrTroy]

The thing is, you could still get a lot of interesting tech from the solaris OS without necessarily taking anything from the kernel. Remeber, that Linux is simply a kernel. It doesn't require that all software run on top of that kernel be run under the same license. If they simply release the Solaris kernel, it probably wouldn't have meant much to Linux, because Linux already has a pretty good kernel, and I'm pretty sure they'd be a little incompatible anyway. I think the main thing that will help is the applications that run on top of the kernel, that Sun may be releasing.

Horses, Loaves and Shoes.

[twitter]

Who cares about Solaris?

Anyone doing any kind of scientific computing, which is a large portion of their customer base. They have been losing that customer base to Linux, which hurts their sales in more ways than one.

You might also care about Solaris if you want to use any of their excellent hardware. If they GPL'd Solaris, no only could you use it without practical and moral problems, you could also do a much better job of porting other free software.

GPL'd Solaris would be a great gift. Don't look it too hard in the mouth.

GPL Java, for crying out loud.

The magic of cross licensing may prevent that. If Sun GPL's Solaris, you can be sure they will do everything in their power to get a free Java out.

Take what it gives and make what it won't.

Re:WTF?!?

[CastrTroy]

But maybe we don't want the most open and least restrictive. Because if we did, we'd all be using BSD. Which is the least restrictive license I know of. I think what a lot of GPL users want is for their code to stay GPL, and for changes made to the code by others to be brought back upstream, so the whole community can take advantage of the changes. I think that's what GPL V3 is trying to accomplish.