Slashdot Mirror
DTrace Becomes Usable on FreeBSD
daria42 writes "A project to port Sun Microsystems' Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) tool to FreeBSD appears to have achieved some initial success. DTrace was open sourced last year and is one of the coolest features in Solaris 10."
I dont think DTrace on FreeBSD is going to sway over and change the mind of those who use and pay and contribute to the GPL. From a strategy point of view it just made BSD's that much more competitive with Solaris and Sun offers. With the GPL you at least get some improvemnts back if your contribution is of value and nobody can close its acess.
Well, or GPL people could take the fine contribution of the BSD people, and port it to GPL. Therefore both communities can benefit. If Sun had released it under GPL, the BSD people would have been prevented from doing this. At least that is my understanding. So in this case the BSD licence seemed like a good choice, the one that maximises freedom for developers.
Furthermore, I believe Sun has stated that they would be happy if DTrace was ported to Linux, and though they can't pay developers to do it, they can provide other help (perhaps like the testsuites).
Again I'm baffled by the level of hostility towards Sun on Slashdot. Here they open source an amazing tool, and help us port it, and they get a lot of nasty comments for it.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die