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.

Floodgates are shut

[brunes69]

Though this could mean an opening of the floodgates to a lot of sharing between Linux and Solaris

Linus already said that Linux is not now, and will not in the near future, be released under GPLv3. And since GPLv3 is not reverse compatible with GPLv2 (it has more restrictions), this won't happen.

Patents in GPL3

[SWroclawski]

One of the least discussed but largest changes in GPL3 is the explicit mention of patents and how patents (if found to be violated) would effect the work as a whole. This is similar to the IBM Public License and is one of those things that I'd imagine would give a corporate lawyer warm fuzzies. Sun and others may find this change so compelling that they'd be willing to give more attention to the GPL3 than the GPL2, which strengthens it further (since these companies want the flow of information to go both).

a race to hypocrisy

[geoffspear]

Which will happen first:

- Linux zealots abandon their "everything about Solaris sucks and I'll never use it" dogma, or
- Mac zealots abandon their "Intel processors suck and I'll never use one" dogma?

The Mac people are taking an early lead, but anything can happen.

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:Horses, Loaves and Shoes.

[Dr_LHA]

You're out of date I'm afraid. Solaris already lost out to Linux in the scientific computing field a few years ago. In my field (Astrophysics) universities 5-10 years ago were 100% Solaris, with some Dec Alphas thrown in the mix. 5 years ago the exodus began to Linux machines when people realised they were faster than Solaris boxes, 1/5th of the price and could run all the same software.

Fast forward to today linux is losing out to Macs in science, every conference I go to it seems that more and more people have Powerbooks (like > 50% of the audience), especially at NASA. My project just decided to move entirely over to Macs. Solaris isn't even in the mix anymore.

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.