Slashdot Mirror
Torvalds vs Schwartz GPL Wars
javipas writes "The controversial message published by Linus Torvalds (mirrored) in the Linux Kernel Mailing List was from the beginning to the end an open attack to Sun and its Open Source strategy. Linus criticized Sun's real position on GPL, and claimed that Linux could be dangerous to Sun. Upon his words, "they may be talking a lot more [about Open Source] than they are or ever will be doing." Jonathan Schwartz's blog has been updated today with a post that is a direct response to Linus claims, but in a much more elegant and coherent way. Sun's CEO notes that "Companies compete, communities simply fracture", and tries to explain why using GPL licenses is taking so long."
Mirror here http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0706 .1/1722.html
My blog
Many moons ago, I was at Sun Opcom when they were trying to release Solaris 8 source to anyone who would sign a non-disclosure, and it was insanely hard to find the rightful owners and get permission to do so much as publish the code.
If my leaky memory is correct, a number of files had to be rewritten from scratch, just to be able to release them to an audince of friendly customers.
You can imagine how hard it is to hunt down and relicense everything as GPLv3, for either Linux or Solaris! Kudos to Scott and Jonathan for their perseverance.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
What exactly is not well thought out about his comments? Incendiary? Which part? All I saw was caution and some speculation, no attacking. In addition, I saw several other high visibility maintainers agree with him.
I also think it goes without saying that they speak for Linux, the kernel, when they offer their opinions. It seems like they've made good decisions up to this point, so we have no reason to not trust them. Sun has promises, but not much else outside of some garbage apps, which isn't much reason to trust them.
Actually, had you bothered to read TFA, you would see that there is no flaming at all in Shwartz's post. He even invites Linus to dinner at the end. I am no fan of sun (although since GPLing Java I am starting to lean that way, I admit), but his reasoning in the post for several things (licensing choices of Solaris, relationship to Linux, etc.) makes a lot of sense.
Sure, we may see a nice flamewar here on Slashdot. But Sun, for their part, are not playing into that in any way. Actually even Linus's post was fairly tame (by Linus standards at least, he mentioned that he could be wrong about some things).