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Bill Joy, ESR, RMS and more on SCSL vs GPL

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the it's-monday-night-nitro-licensing dept.

Frank Sullivan writes "Upside Today has this excellent article on the relative value of Sun's "Community Source" license versus the GPL. Richard Brandt, an Upside columnist, wrote recently that Sun "doesn't get" Open Source. Bill Joy responded with an email saying that SCSL is less restrictive than GPL, rather than more restrictive. Brandt forwarded this to ESR and RMS, and a "frank exchange of views" ensued. Many interesting questions were raised, such as is the right to fork a bug or a feature? Well worth reading, if you're interested in the philosophy of source code licensing. " Wow. Well worth the time of reading.

3 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. A few comments by jd · · Score: 5
    First off, when Bill Joy talks about "improving" Linux, it's not clear whether he is talking about a sold distribution or an internal one. The distinction DOES matter.

    The GPL would allow you to keep an internal improvement to the Linux core proprietary and closed. You could distribute the binaries throughout the corporation and never have to provide a line of source.

    Secondly, he does not make it clear what kind of "improvements" he is referring to. Again, this matters.

    Anything that can be compiled and inserted as modules (INCLUDING code which modifies the kernel, as it's running) is NOT covered by the Linux GPL. Thus, such improvements CAN be shipped as closed, proprietary binaries. There's NOTHING to stop you from doing that.

    Third, the "normal" method of getting return is to sell your product. The GPL explicitly permits you do do this, just so long as you don't restrict the purchaser's freedom. There's nothing in the GPL that is inherently "anti-sell".

    Then, there's the matter of the choice of licence. This guy says he worked on the BSD licence. So why not use that? People are fine with it, you get to keep your binaries as closed as you like, and you don't have the complication of flooding the userspace with different, incompatiable licences.

    If there's something I'm seriously missing, please enlighten me! Otherwise, could someone from Sun kindly either fill in the blanks, explain why one of the million other semi-OSS licences (such as BSD) were unused, or rectify the situation by USING one of these other licences! Nobody is pressuring Sun to go GNU!

    I happen to like the GPL because it suits my needs. Sun doesn't think it suits theirs, and I respect that. But there's a million alternatives out there. We DON'T need Yet Another Licence, which conflicts with Every Other Licence. Unless there is a VERY good tactical reason for going that route, I would have to say it is mindboggingly STUPID!!!

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  2. Bad point by Gabriel by Cironian · · Score: 5

    Eric Raymond: Very different. The SCSL enforces control with the threat of lawsuit and jail. Linus controls the kernel because the community grants him authority in recognition of his authorship.

    Richard Gabriel: What if Torvalds were a dictator? Would this be better or worse than Sun exerting some influence or control? Hard to say.

    The kind of control Linus has over the kernel (lets just leave out Alan for simplicity) is far better than what Sun does simply because if for example Linus started to think that upcoming kernel releases should only run on "Genuine Intel" processors, everyone would just start using a kernel distribution managed by someone else. Linus just managed to keep the control by the users respect for the quality of what he is doing, not because it says in some license that he is entitled to that control.

  3. Right to fork... by Fnkmaster · · Score: 5
    After reading this article I'm still not quite sure if Bill Joy Gets It (TM). The thing that bothers me the most is the discussion of the right to fork code, a right that we all agree the GPL provides (at least, I think all of us agree on this), and a right that Bill Joy tries to claim SCSL provides.

    Somehow he claims that the right to implement compatible applications (i.e. to reverse engineer an API in the case of Java) is the "right to fork" granted by the SCSL.

    I refuse to believe that this seasoned programmer doesn't understand the meaning of a code fork. Rather it seems he is just determined to divert the issue. It seems clear to me that SCSL doesn't allow code forking (i.e. complete, modified versions of the source may not be redistributed under SCSL or any other license).

    This is not a Good Thing (TM), from our (Free Software/Open Source community) point of view. Nevertheless we recognize Sun's right to license their code in any way they see fit, as they recognize ours. But I would at least hope they could be honest about it and not claim that their license offers something it doesn't.