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."

Comments

It's flame time

[vivaoporto]

There is nothing like media pitting two public figures against one another and, consequently, pitting supporters and detractors against each other, in order to generate some cheap polemic to exploit for some 15 minutes. Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:It's flame time

[Dunbal]

There is nothing like media pitting two public figures against one another and, consequently, pitting supporters and detractors against each other, in order to generate some cheap polemic to exploit for some 15 minutes.

It's called "politics".

Re:It's flame time

[OpenGLFan]

Good point. It's definitely interesting. I think sometimes it's good to see science and engineering as human pursuits, but even when it may look like the spittle is flying across with the packets, these are just two intelligent guys with differing points of view who would probably buy each other a beer when they're done for the day.

Even Linus and Andy Tanenbaum respect each other, I think. Otherwise they wouldn't care what the hell the other thought. The verbal fencing is just nerdy snark at DEFCON 2. If you can't read "You would've failed in my class" with a chuckle, then you've been watching too much politics on TV. Linus would've wrecked the curve in Tanenbaum's class. He didn't design a monolithic kernel structure out of ignorance; he had a goal, and he thought that was the best way to go about it.

I wouldn't quite say "nothing to see here"...but there's no actual malice. These are two guys who are smarter than I am; I read what they think and why, and am smarter for it on both sides.

Re:It's flame time

[nomadic]

There is nothing like media pitting two public figures against one another

I know, this is obviously going to drive Paris back to page 7 of the tabloids. We'll just have to suffer through the 24/7 news coverage on all the cable news channels until this explosive story dies out. I feel bad for Torvalds and Schwartz for having to put up with the constant paparazzi swarming around them, but if you live so much in the public eye like them it's something you just have to deal with.

Re:It's flame time

[2short]

There's no flaming in either post, nor really much at all in Schwartz's.

Someone on the LKML was talking about how Sun says lots of nice things about what their going to do with open source. Linus said essentially, "Looking at their history, they say lots of nice things, but only do anything substantive when it's in their self interest, as you'd expect."

Then Schwartz responded by.... saying lots of nice things.

Re:It's flame time

[asninn]

Hindsight's always perfect. Do you really expect Tanenbaum would have had any qualms about letting him fail if Linux had been a class project, with no actual real-world use? I don't think he would've just done so right away without giving Linus a chance, but it would've been mild coercion at best - the "I'm the professor, trust me, I know what's right and wrong, so why don't you change your design now, son, you'll get a better grade that way... after all, I *am* the professor, and I control your grades, if you catch my drift" kind.

So without any actual proof (or even evidence) that Linus' design was solid, he certainly would've failed. And even now, I don't think that Tanenbaum admits that monolithic or hybrid kernels (because let's face it, Linux isn't 100% monolithic) are actually better; the most you'll probably get out of him is "yes, they're being used widely, and they haven't failed catastrophically, but microkernels are still be fundamentally better".

He's a zealot, basically (and I don't automatically mean in a bad way - he's just a zealot the same kind that, say, RMS is a zealot), whereas Linus is a pragmatic engineer (he sure has some strong opinions, too, but he can always back them up and he's willing to change them if presented with convincing evidence that they're wrong). That's the fundamental difference between the two, and it's also why Linus would've failed if he had been in Tanenbaum's class and if he hadn't changed his design according to Tanenbaum's wishes.

That being said, to not make this an entirely off-topic post, keep in mind that Schwartz is not an engineer, either. He wants to sell you a product - nothing more, nothing less.

Schwartz has the right attitude

[Anonymous Coward]

It's working together, not working against each other. The F/OSS community is HUGE, but wasting resources is always silly. As Schwartz put it: "Let's stop wasting time recreating wheels we both need to roll forward."

Very nice attitude.

Linus needs to stop speaking for Linux

[HairyCanary]

Unfortunately, due to his position, his personal opinion counts for too much. He needs to be more careful posting incendiary comments like this, because the public at large interprets his comments as the position of the rest of the Linux (and dare I say, open source) community. It does not help that his comments are so obviously not well thought out. At least think it through before inserting your foot squarely in your mouth.

Re:Linus needs to stop speaking for Linux

[AKAImBatman]

What exactly is not well thought out about his comments? Incendiary? Which part?

The whole thing?

first off: they may be talking a lot more than they are or ever will be doing.

This is incredibly unfair given that Sun has released OpenOffice, Java, NFS, major GNOME improvements, Solaris, SPARC, and a variety of other significant items into open source. While Sun struggled for a while before they got it right (they were hesitant to give up their favorite lawsuit club for beating Microsoft over the head), they did eventually embrace true OSS licensing.

While I understand his frustration with Sun's glacial pace, he needs to remember that Linux usage would be nowhere near where it is today if not for several key contributions by Sun.

they sure as hell don't want to help Linux.

Similarly not fair and incendiary. Yes, Sun has their own operating system. But they also sell a lot of Linux servers and even tried jumping on the distro bandwagon for a while. Again, Sun is having a lot of difficulty rationalizing the two different OSes. But that does NOT mean that they are hostile toward Linux development. Open sourcing Solaris isn't so much as an attempted coup (IMHO) as it is a rational attempt to find a middle ground between Sun's existing codebase and the Linux codebase.

they'll not be releasing ZFS and the other things that people are drooling about in a way that lets Linux use them on an equal footing. I can pretty much guarantee that.

I'm fairly certain that Linus will be eating those words in the future. ZFS is already under the CDDL license, which means that it can be included by distributions already. Just not folded into the core code. I'm certain that this will change with time, and that the CDDL will eventually be eschewed in favor of the GPL. Sort of like Sun's 500 licenses for Java before they finally got where they were going.

See the OpenSolaris stuff - instead of being blinded by the code they _did_ release under an open source license, ask yourself what they did *not* end up releasing.

Ok.

Q: Self, what did Sun not release under OpenSolaris?
A: Oh, that's easy self. They didn't release any code encumbered by previous licensing problems and/or someone else's trade secret. These components are the reason why most companies refuse to OSS their software even after they have no use for it anymore. Sun took a different approach and cleaned the codebase before release. They had the same problem with releasing the Java2D and JavaSound implementatons under the GPL. They were unable to release these components because they were owned by Kodak and Dolby respectively.

Yes, they finally released Java under GPLv2, and they should be commended for that. But you should also ask yourself why, and why it took so long. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that other Java implementations started being more and more relevant?

This is just plain hubris. Anyone who has spent time in the Java community knows why Sun was so difficult about releasing control over Java: Microsoft.

Microsoft tried the whole Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish with Java. The only thing that saved it was Sun's legal department. It wasn't until MS was fully committed to their COOL project (ni, .NET/C#) that Sun felt they were in the clear. So they slowly released it, with a strong eye toward potential forking and incompatibilities. And to be perfectly honest, Sun never understood why the community wanted their codebase so badly. But the community pushed, and Sun eventually gave in. (Primarily due to Schwartz's leadership!)

FWIW, I've worked with Sun several times. They really do work hard to be helpful, but they are also very methodical about it. For example, when the primary maintainer of a Linux distribution and I got in an argument about whether or no

Re:License changes take a loooong time

[davecb]

Oh, I do think Linus wants to help people, it's just that he's a very practical kind of person, and isn't motivated by the same things as either the FSF or a company. And perhaps isn't all that impressed by either (;-))

I suspect he's going to be impressed if and only if FSF release a clean GPLv3 and Sun releases an GPL'd Solaris. Those would make it far more practical for he and the Solarii to compete in the area which I consider most important: code quality.

--dave

communities what?

[MrKaos]

Companies compete, communities co-operate.

It remains to see who participates and the nature of the co-operation. Sun contributing Java, even for cynical reasons, says more about Open Source as an evolving business model than a fracturing community.

And so what if it fractures anyway, maybe that makes software evolve in a more "natural" way.

Re:oh man

[abdulla]

It's a trap!

Sun and Open Source

[thethibs]

To my mind, the relationship between Sun and Open Source has always been coloured by Sun's Big Thing: Java.

As a development platform, Java only had one new thing to offer. Perl, Python, PHP, C et al. are "write once, run anywhere" languages, as long as you publish the source. Sun's contribution is a language that supports "write once, run anywhere" without publishing the source.

In other words, Sun's most interesting contribution to the software industry is a powerful (if painful to use) tool for distributing proprietary closed source applications.

I keep wondering whether they just stumbled into this or whether it was a strategic move. In either case, it's hardly a testimonial to Sun's support of Open Source.

Re:Sun and Open Source

[MobyTurbo]

As a development platform, Java only had one new thing to offer. Perl, Python, PHP, C et al. are "write once, run anywhere" languages, as long as you publish the source. Sun's contribution is a language that supports "write once, run anywhere" without publishing the source. I'm no big fan of Java, but allow me to point out that GNU's biggest contribution to the open source world is arguably GNU C and glibc, which just as much aren't designed as vehicles for publishing source (i.e. what interpreted languages, well, unlike, say, Microsoft BASIC, Perl and Python are technically bytecoded too, but humor me.) Considering the environment that Java was originally marketed for (browser apps) there are good security, portability, as well as performance reasons more relevant at the time, for making client-side browser apps pseudocompiled.

ZFS everywhere? Doubtful

[renoX]

If they were really interested in seeing ZFS everywhere, why did they release it in a license incompatible with the GPL license?

Wrong.

[Spy der Mann]

Companies compete.
Communities EVOLVE.

Re:Is this going to hurt?

[Elliot_Lin]

Actually, if anything Linux does a better job of supporting hardware for me than Windows does most of the time. Even my 'Windows Only' Wacom tablet. And I don't know when the last time you looked at linux was... but it might be worth having another look..

Re:Linus, please join us in the here and now....

[drinkypoo]

Single-threaded SPARC performance on modern processors is perfectly fine. In fact it's better than on Intel / AMD in that it's always the same. ie - it runs the same speed, regardless of load.

What? What the hell are you talking about?

"runs the same speed" regardless of "load"? Could you please use some technical terms here? x86 instructions complete in a given number of cycles (barring branch misprediction, to which SPARC is not immune) so intel/AMD chips also always run at the same speed (barring throttling.)

I've had horrible experiences with RedHat in particular

Well, that's fair - so has everyone else. (Some people are simply willing to overlook them)

They aren't making Solaris look like Linux, they are however, making Solaris cross platform (Sparc/AMD/Intel)

*cough*bullshit*cough* As a newborn Sun employee, Murdock is thinking about making Solaris more Linux-like. "When people say Linux what do they mean? Linux is a kernel. Cool apps are not written to the kernel. The OS powers higher levels of the stack. What we want is an open OS platform and to make sure that the existing skill sets and knowledge and training investments are leveraged. We don't want to make them learn a new product or rip and replace," Murdock said. "You can make a real argument that Solaris innovated more than Linux in the last few years--such as DTrace and ZFS--but usability stands in the way of appreciating that," Murdock said. "Part of what we are working on is closing the usability gap so that it doesn't stand in the way." (next para, emphasis mine:) "There is no reason we can't make Solaris look and feel more like Linux," he continued. "There are a couple of ways we could do it. We could stick a penguin on it or take a Linux distribution and put a Solaris kernel in it. There are a few Solaris-based distros that have done that. Personally, as the person charting the course and looking at the strategy question, it becomes how to keep the competitive differentiation of Solaris while closing the usability gap."

Perhaps you should try to be informed before you attempt to refute my statements? Especially since you're wrong.

Also, it's worth noting that there's Sun SPARC-based hardware that OpenSolaris doesn't run on, because Sun won't give out sufficient specifications. Theo's way of putting it was "Sun released CPU docs, but that's useless. It is kind of like trying to fix a car engine with the owner's manual. The rest of the hardware is not documented."

Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time.