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Sun Considering GPL For OpenSolaris
narramissic writes, "At an event today to formally open-source Java, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and CEO, and Rich Green, the company's senior VP of software had an exchange in which Schwartz put Green on the spot about using GPL for OpenSolaris: 'Are you averse to changing the license, Rich Green?' Schwartz asked. 'Certainly not,' Green responded, prompting the Sun CEO to fire back in a half-joking manner: 'Will you GPL Solaris, Mr. Green?' 'We will take a close look at it,' Green said, adding that it was possible that the familiarity and comfort level many developers have with the GPL may result in Sun adopting it for OpenSolaris." Another note about Sun's decision to use the GPL for Java comes from reader squiggleslash, who writes: "According to Jonathan Schwartz, the decision of Novell and Microsoft to '(suggest) that free and open source software wasn't safe unless a royalty was being paid' is what prompted Sun to finally come down on using the GPL for Java. So I guess every cloud has a silver lining."
Remember, SUN makes money on hardware.
Novell and Microsoft do not.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Sorry for the fanboyish response, but I think releaseing various parts of Open Solaris under the GNU license would lead to some great developments. As I understand it, that would enable a lot of features of the Solaris kernel to be imported into Linux and vice-versa.
;)
Of course, there'd be a problem with that whole "gnu's NOT unix" thing...
This could be a bigger boon than a lot of people realize. The licensing differences between Solaris and Linux are one of several factors slowing them from adopting ideas and code from one another. OpenSolaris users could benefit from ease of importing more cutting edge features from Linux. Linux could benefit by having access to some of the cleaner implementation ideas from Solaris. I've felt for some time that much of what holds linux back is the unwillingness to adopt newer and better features out of a fear that a given distribution will be less compatible with others and because Linux is trying to wear many hats. Too many decisions are made to benefit its use as a server or make it easier to use on a portable, while leaving it behind others for a workstation.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
It certainly removes one barrier. But look at Darwin. It's open source, but who else but a handful of people outside of Apple are working on it? So the point is not to knock the potential change. The point is will developers flock to Solaris as a result of this? Slowly but surely or not fast enough?
According to Jonathan Schwartz, the decision of Novell and Microsoft to '(suggest) that free and open source software wasn't safe unless a royalty was being paid' is what prompted Sun to finally come down on using the GPL for Java. So I guess every cloud has a silver lining. If you believe that, want to buy some old dot com stocks I traded for some swamp land a few years back? Honest, ill give you a great deal!
A company the size of Sun does not move that quickly, especially so far as legal matters go. Besides, there has been talk of GPLing Java before Christmas for months.
Sun saw a chance to take a shot at Microsoft/Novell and they took it. Can't say I fault them, but its fairly obviously a lie.
Oh lordy, then what's the RMS fan club going to bitch about?
This is just my understanding, but Darwin doesn't have nearly as many 'interesting' features that don't already exist in Linux. There is some neat Solaris-only stuff that people have wanted to bring into Linux for a while, but have not been able to because of licensing problems, and the work it would take to clean-room it.
... but I've definitely not heard as much 'buzz' about them as you hear about some particular features of Solaris that are supposedly very neat.
The thing that I always hear talk about is dtrace (currently CDL, and tightly integrated with the Solaris kernel), but looking at the WP article on it, apparently it's been partially brought over to BSD and OS X. Then there are also containers and that "self-healing" fault-isolation system, which I don't pretend to understand.
Perhaps there are just as many cool, compelling features in Darwin that aren't talked about, and deserve being shared with Linux and other OSes
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Sun does two things well. Rock solid hardware and excellent service. GPLing Solaris and Java allows them to limit resources spend on software development. In addition, GPL compatible Solaris and Linux will blur the lines between the OS as they adopt each other's best features. Linux and Solaris might become binary compatible. Sun can focus on selling hardware and services.
Earth to NineNine: they haven't charged for Solaris or Java all along. They are a services and hardware company. If Solaris technologies move to Linux, then Sun has only to be sure that their hardware is the best supported Linux product to make a go of it. This is smart, good business and it's about time Sun figured that out. OpenSolaris won't be closed because for now it's got a lead on SPARC hardware as well as some features which are unique to Sun but over time it is obvious to all but the most clueless that Linux is where the community is putting the majority of effort and one would have to be a complete cluebie not to see that it is not slowing down or conceding defeat on any front.
...Steve
More interesting than this, IMHO, is to note that for Java they choose to use the "GNU GPL v2 only" (plus Classpath exception) license, not the more common "GPL v2 or any later version".
This is what the Java FAQ says about it:
And, from this InfoQ article about the GPLed Java:
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
ZFS has some really awesome features. Pooling, snapshots (no, not quite like LVM), RAID-Z, and native compression and soon encryption.
I'd love to see all this in Linux but I'm thinking even if it were GPLed there would be a lot of work to do to port it. And of course after its ported, the Linux devs would probably make a big stink about accepting it using lines like "a file system should only put files on a block device!" ZFS however is a different approach to storing files and in many ways much better.
Surely you're toking, mister Nineman.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Not to mention the fact that, although it is true that Sun is gradually open sourcing all of its software, most of what Sun makes it enterprise software. What company is really going to use Sun's RFID software to run a warehouse floor, or use Sun's identity management software to manage authentication and access control for an entire enterprise, and not get a support contract from Sun? Open sourcing this type of stuff probably doesn't impact Sun's sales negatively one iota. Open sourcing Java may be riskier, but I'm curious to see how it really pans out.
Breakfast served all day!
BSD licence? Hello? I don't think Sun prefers a license where everyone (MS) can copy stuff from Solaris into their proprietary products without giving anything back. BSD license may have its place, but this is not it.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I can't decide whether Sun has balls of spent Uranium or if they're just really disparate. Possibly both. But I really like this, and I hope their services and hardware businesses benefit accordingly.
Sun makes the vast bulk of their money from hardware sales and support. They have little (if anything) to lose from GPLing Solaris.
Contrast this to, say, Microsoft, who makes most of their money from software sales. Clearly, GPLing their software would be financial suicide.
Yeah, Right....I bet they'll GPL java before they allow that to happen. :)
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
What about hardware support?
Not to start an argument, but wasn't there an article posted on this very website telling us how OpenSolaris was/is the Linux killer*? So far how has that one panned out? Other F/OSS operating systems never really make it to relevancy because frankly, their hardware support is always years behind that of Linux. That very reason is why I switched (at least for now) from BSD, back to Linux.
*I must note that it funny that they compared OpenSolaris to SUSE - clearly the slowest of the major Linux distros.
Hm...
.. - without spending hours for #ifdef'ing and patching the source.
When you can get an open-sourced carrier-grade OS like (Open)Solaris at no cost,
why still Linux?
OpenSolaris surely currently lacks a lot of (x86) hardware support, no drivers
for widespread hardware, etc. - but as more and more users actively use and
support OpenSolaris, more and more vendors will provide those.
What I don't like about Linux - Linux (and a lot of Linux software), that is - is
the neverending story of changing APIs - use something, update something else - Oops.
I have a Linux system here, with at least three different versions of, e.g., BerkeleyDB.
1.85 compat, 3.something, 4.idontknow. API changes, incompatibilities, you name it.
Ever tried to compile popular Linux software on another Un*x? Whenever I encounter some
piece of GPL-licensed software, I can almost guarantee it won't compile on Solaris, Tru64,
You want DTrace? Zones? Use Solaris. Is there any technical reason (no politics, please) where
using Linux actually offers any benefit?
(Yes, "smc" and all those java-based admin utilities suck. But commandline-based alternatives
do exist.)
This is not a flamebait. Serious answers will be appreciated.
The best part about Sun being GPLed (the CDDL is a fine license itself) is that ZFS can be implemented as a kernel module rather than in FUSE. The idea of running non-trivial enterprise filesystem in user-space is abhorent to me.
Yeah, I've been playing with Nexenta and was pretty impressed by the layout (and ZFS of course), but had a rough time figuring out what hardware was detected, how drivers are loaded, and so on.
As for the Linux distros, I had to start thinking about them as branches in a family tree, rather than as one OS. There is the Debian lineage, the RedHat/Fedora lineage, the Gentoo lineage, ....
Wow, I would really like to see some evidence of that. As it stands, it's just an absurd claim with no support. Having (over a period of 15+ years) used Sun equipment and software, and having worked with the company as a customer, and having known people who were employees at Sun, I would say that the chances of this being true are about 0.01%. Sun doesn't like being told what to do by Microsoft, or have you forgotten that Sun once famously sued Microsoft over Java and also once banned PowerPoint presentations? In fact, here's a Scott McNealy quote about the PowerPoint thing:
So, it's really hard to believe that a company with this history would be in bed with Microsoft and on some kind of anti-GPL crusade. Anyway, you also said:
I hardly see how this can be considered flip-flopping. Two years, neither Solaris nor Java was open source in any sense. A year ago (approximately), Solaris was open-sourced. Today, Java was open-sourced, and they mentioned they are thinking of adding GPL to the list of licenses for Solaris. This seems like a steady trend in the direction of open source.
So what? Dovecot is a really cool GPL-ed POP/IMAP server, and I don't recall the FSF making any announcement when it was released. Nor do I recall the FSF making any announcement when many other things were released under the GPL. It's not necessary because the GPL speaks for itself.
What common ancestors? Solaris is based on System V Unix from AT&T, not on BSD. Yes, Solaris 1.x (a/k/a SunOS 4.x) was based on BSD, but it was pretty much totally rewritten before Solaris 2.x, so Solaris 2.x (and 7, 8, 9, 10, etc.) have very little in common with Solaris 1.x, and thus very little in common with BSD. You will notice that /usr/bin/ps
on Solaris takes options like "-ef" rather than
options like "aux", and you will also notice that
sh's echo command needs "\c" in
the string instead of "-n" as a separate argument
if you want to supress the newline. So you can see that
the Solaris command-line utilities are not very BSD-like.
The point here is that you can't make money selling GPLed software, without tying it to some other product.
The dual license isn't another product. It's another set of terms through which another entity can distribute copies of your product, presumably with a different set of restrictions.
What you have to lose from the GPL is the likelihood of ever selling your software. What you have to gain is the relatively remote possibility that other people will be nice enough to improve your product for free.
You have the good will of your customers to gain. If your product is worth its salt, which not all are, you'll sell licenses in any case. Larger entities will definitely buy, and a large number of them will not use anything that does not have some sort of paid support structure.
Microsoft. Most game companies. There's no shortage of companies (or corporate departments) who derive most of their money from selling software (or software licenses).
Microsoft makes their share from publishing MCSE training materials as well. Most game publishers make their money from selling some (but definitely not all or even most) software, the whole thing being a gamble of who will buy which typically shelf life limited product first. Those that last for a longer time without languishing on the shelf tend to be those with an additional cost, such as WoW and EQ.
I didn't say companies who had _no_ other sources of revenue, I said companies who derive most of their money from software sales. The GPL makes that essentially impossible and, hence, removes those companies' business models. *THAT* is why TrollTech dual-licence QT - because they know if they didn't they would have a great deal of trouble making enough money to stay in business.
You said major sources of revenue, and both training and support can be major sources. TrollTech added the GPL to their product because their customers demanded it; the QPL was there before, and no doubt some customers were already using those terms who may not wish to use the GPL.
What I find ironic is that even the people who steadfastly insist the GPL is "business friendly" usually do so in the same breath they say "because you can just dual license" - seemingly unaware they're shooting down their own argument.
No, what's convenient about the GPL is that you protect your product from proprietary exploitation by your competitors in a modified form that you cannot use yourself. No one-upsmanship where you cannot follow, unless they pay you for the privilege. An additional license is simply an agreement between yourself and those who want different terms, with a different pricing tier.
GPL: Free as in will
I put the "wild" preface there for a reason. The FSF is a great organization, but sometimes they are a bit nutty. Eben has some heavy insight into things from a legal and IBM perspective, and is tied directly to important figures in these matters. He likely heard a rumor or two and pieced it together as something far larger than it was. I have no sources other than what I heard at that meeting.
The FSF has been listing a Free version of Java as a top priority for the past few years, stating that it is the largest hole in the Free Software community. See http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html. The FSF shouldn't announce the GPL'ing of Java, but it should respond to the announcements by commending Sun, removing GCC/Java from it's priorities list, and/or getting Stallman to amend his Java rant.My bad, I got it backwards (which is odd, since I'm a Solaris admin). That was added as an afterthought.
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