Sun actually supports Harmony and said so the day it was announced - VNU has it wrong (as usual). Congratulations, you found the only report that neglected to mention that both the senior Sun engineer responsible for Java strategy and the person responsible for future open source strategy at Sun both expressed support for harmony at a level pretty similar to IBM's support ("jolly good, and we may contribute at some point in the future"). While Gosling's misreported off-the-cuff comments make for good tabloid sensationalism they don't represent Sun's official view.
Yes, those are the sort of provisions I'd want to see. Combinability also needs to be addressed. The other strength of MPL-style licenses is that they allow a binary to be built from a mix of licenses.
What version of Solaris are you running? Most of the x86 performance issues I'm aware of have been addressed in Solaris 10 and the people I hear from tell me the speed differential you're describing has gone away.
So let me be perfectly clear. Sun has never been a patent terrorist and does not intend to start now. Sun accumulates patents in parallel with software development in just the same way that all US corporations do - it would be irresponsible to do otherwise. However, our policy is to grant these patents to the communities around the software they relate to.
If you read the license that you are granted by the Java specifications, you'll find that they give you an unrestricted blanket grant of all the patents Sun has that might be infringed by Java implementations. The same is true of the CDDL and OpenSolaris - if you work in the OpenSolaris commons, you have the full use and protection of Sun's patents. As more companies work in that commons, the CDDL will force them to donate all their patents too. Those grants survive anything that may happen to the companies involved, so even a hostile acquisition would not result in the loss of patent protection. Blanket grant provisions incrementally build a meshed patent commons that promises safety for developers and as it grows offers protection against patent terrorism.
Until we're able to reform the patent system (and Sun is a firm believer in patent reform and is working behind the scenes in Europe too to promote sanity) the smart thing to do is not to neglect patents, any more than it would be smart for a policeman who opposed gun ownership to protest by not wearing body armour. However, I think the F/OSS meta-community should show zero tolerance for patent holders who don't give the communities in which they work blanket protection from their patent holdings.
This does not mean I want to see lots of individual patents in some way made public. Software patents are deeply flawed and breach the social contract implied by patenting because they do not usually provide the know-how in a way that the public commons is enriched. Software patents are not sources of either sample code or of inspiration. Instead, I want to see corporations forced to donate all patents that are used by the various code commons they care about, with a blanket, unenumerated, blind grant and an enforceable patent peace. That's why I am a fan of the MPL/CDDL!
That's why I'm also not a proponent of multiple licensing - yes, I have considered it. If people could use the GPL as their license, they would not have to contribute to the patent commons surrounding OpenSolaris or be subject to its patent peace provisions. Multiple licenses are great all the time they share values, but I am so committed to creating a patent-safe developer commons around OpenSolaris that I feel it would be a bad idea to multi-license CDDL-licensed code until the GPL has suitably strong patent provisions. Once the GPL becomes combinable and includes patent protection, I would be very happy to revisit this view.
In any case. Here's hoping the CDDL (or some other derivitive) becomes a common standard useful for both commercial entities and the community that helps bring an end to this "license du jour" nonsense.
I couldn't agree more. For what it's worth, I am not too worried which MPL-derivative license becomes the one 'template' license that everyone uses. I would be very pleased to work on MPL 2, if that would be more 'politically acceptable'. As I have made clear on my blog, I believe that the MPL license family brings the greatest freedom while preserving the value of the commons, so I think it would be a mistake to allow zealots to misguidely extinguish it.
At Sun, we couldn't wait for a template MPL to be created independently for OpenSolaris because we were very keen to get the existing global Solaris community in a position to work with the code, but there's frankly no obstacle in the future to working on a 'blessed' reusable license in the MPL family. What I hope the CDDL makes impossible is the creation of any more 'vanity' clones of the MPL. If anyone tries, they deserve the full wrath of the meta-community.
Assuming you are referring to my blog entry discussing the way that the success, not failure, of MPL-style licenses is at the root of the license proliferation problem, I'm afraid I don't agree with you. LGPL does not include the explicit patent grant that the MPL includes, nor does it establish ground rules for maintaining a patent peace, and thus does not serve as the archetype for MPL licenses and their (many) derivatives. Instead it includes an exception to the scope of the GPL which depends on the language and architecture of the software in use and makes assumptions on how dynamic linking will take place. In all other respects it is the same as my third license category, GPL licenses.
OpenSolaris will be a full, buildable system with as few components as possible (mainly drivers) available only as binary when it launches this quarter. The pilot program is already testing and building the code (Ben Rockwood, for example) and has started thinking laterally about new potential distributions like PPC.
Actually the wikipedia article doesn't say that. It says:
Sun Microsystems, in contrast, considers its UltraSPARC IV to be a multi-threaded rather than multi-processor chip. Intel agrees with Sun. This is not an idle debate, because software is often more expensive when licensed for more processors.
Sun refers to the architecture as Chip-level Multi-Threading (CMT) and according to the white paper, while there are indeed multiple cores, each can also multi-thread:
Sun's CMT processors will also have multiple cores on a single piece of silicon, with each core being able to process multiple threads, as shown in Figure 1.5. As a result, a single CMT processor will be able to process tens of threads simultaneously, exponentially increasing the amount of data processed each second.
Cache also seems to have been considered:
Shared chip resources such as large amounts of cache are designed to speed communications between cores to streamline parallel processing of threads.
So while breathless enthusiasm may not be in order, a certain level of optimism seems warranted:-)
Simultaneous multithreading allows multiple threads to execute different instructions in the same clock cycle, using the execution units that the first thread left spare.
CMP is SMP implemented on a single VLSI integrated circuit. Multiple processor cores (multicore) typically share a common second- or third-level cache and interconnect.
In other words, Niagara implements in hardware, at greater scale, what Pentium 4 offers as an emulation feature. In theory one could SMP on top of CMP chipsets for even greater throughput. If you find the Sun article too hard, the Wikipedia references I have cited will probably prove much easier to understand.
I agree. This whole hypefest may be a storm in a thimble but it reinforces the need to use an end-to-end encryption that you control. Personally I think Ethereal is a more real threat than the AOL ToS but the solution is the same.
For encryption, I'm not an advocate of gaim-encryption as the answer. It means that people all need to use Gaim and that's just not practical. Personally I think OTR is a better option. As well as a GAIM plug-in it offers a proxy so that any IM tool can be made secure, and it addresses the weaknesses gaim-encryption ignores - from their FAQ:
The gaim-encryption plugin provides encryption and authentication, but not deniability or perfect forward secrecy. If an attacker or a virus gets access to your machine, all of your past gaim-encryption conversations are retroactively compromised. Further, since all of the messages are digitally signed, there is difficult-to-deny proof that you said what you did: not what we want for a supposedly private conversation!
It is even really worth fighting software patents in europe when clearly the european parliment will do it's own thing whatever the people say?
Totally worth it. As an earlier post pointed out, the EP is actually highly aggravated by the actions of the Council of Ministers in approving the Directive without their amendments. Groklaw has the EP's press release on the subject and it's clear the EP is mad as hell - the language borders on the undiplomatic, which for Europe is very unusual.
"The quarrel between the Commission and Parliament over the directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions goes on. During a plenary debate on Tuesday evening, MEPs attacked the Commission's refusal to submit its draft directive for a new first reading by Parliament. They also criticised the directive's scope."
The reason this upsets the EP is that if the decision is allowed to stand it sets a precedent for binding legislation to be created in Council without any recourse for elected assemblies - if the EP doesn't manage to get all MEPs in the room to vote it down now, the thing will pass unaltered and all EU states will be compelled to implement it as law.
So, for the first time, we can really make a difference by writing to MEPs and ensuring they are aware that this is a big deal for their constituents. The political trap is set, it's up to us to spring it. Personally I have already gone to WriteToThem and written to my MEPs, it was very easy.
So what is Linux? Yes, clinically it is just the kernel but when the discussion is around "running Linux" people mean the whole distribution. That depends on XFree86 and for many people depends also on Gnome, for a subset it depends on OpenOffice.org as well.
Just because you hate Sun don't diss the real contributions they make to Linux by paying for engineers to contribute significantly to Gnome, X, and all the other stuff most Linux users depend on every day.
I see you have a link in your sig to my work blog. While I'm flattered, there are two problems with that:
People seem to think you are me - please could you add a note to tell them that's not the case?
It would be better if you linked to the OpenSolaris category as I write about other things too and the entries you are linking to have already scrolled halfway down the page.
Thanks!
S.
(Mods & meta-mods: Sorry, only way I can find to communicate over this one)
They're claiming this is "Java-based". Never heard of this kind of stuff running any way except as native code. A breakthrough in VM technology, or more abuse of the Java "brand"?
Take a look at the actual project. You'll find it's all Java code, and that it uses Java 3D as an generalisation layer to control the video card. So actually a vindication of the virtualisation concept, yes.
Actually there's already a very active gaming group at Sun, led by their Chief Gaming Officer. There are already a few commercial Java-based games around and I think there are more in the pipeline.
> Aggregation may have something to do with "governance"
Yes, as the FAQ states and as you point out it's so that a single entity is able to act on behalf of the community to defend (or prosecute) copyright license violations (that FAQ isn't precise, I agree). As you and I both know copyright and patents are very different, and this aggregation is not related to patents in any useful way. As far as I know no-one has come up with any meaningful defence against the capricious and broken software patent system created by case law.
> You should be aware that I have been critical of IBM and its patents
Yes, I am aware of and grateful for that, thank-you. My comment was related to the current context where IBM's community manipulation has had little critical evaluation even by RMS (who I assume will be working on GNU Fastenings with IBM's tamper-proof screw patent as we speak).
> then they reneged upon that promise.
I prefer to think they've just not got round to it yet for lack of funds in that business unit (it's a big deal financially). But I agree with you on this one, I would rather see the interests separated too.
You're conflating two concerns here, the fear of a patent infringement lawsuit and the mistrust of Sun as a steward of OpenOffice.org.
Sun, like Apache, aggregates copyrights so it can manage the codebase effectively and defend license violations. I believe both Sun and Apache are right to do this and that it's sound practice to get contributor agreements and copyright assignments from committers.
Contributor agreements are the best anyone can do right now defending against patents. When it comes to a patent infringement lawsuit, the stupidity of the patent system means that no-one can anticipate it ("no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition", as Monty Python observed). To rephrase your example, if Apache were to be shut down by patent lawsuits, IBM Websphere would happily carry on rolling independently of it - in fact that's one of the strengths of open source. The possibility of that in no way implies either that Apache should not aggregate copyrights for good governance or that IBM should not sit on the Apache board.
Your concern therefore seems to boil down to not liking Sun being the steward of openoffice.org. Understood. I'll work on it.
But the deletion of 'exhibit A' is explained in the detailed rationale thus:
This section is based on Sections 3.3 and 3.5 of the MPL, though the form by which a Contributor identifies Modifications is no longer specified. References to Exhibit A were also removed. This was done because the requirements of the MPL seemed overly specific and burdensome; even the Mozilla community doesn't seem to consistently adhere to this practice. Since failure to follow requirements of the license can have significant legal repercussions, it seemed best to be pragmatic and leave the details of how notice is provided to the community and its developers. We note that our requirement is similar to that of other open source licenses (e.g., CPL, OSL).
In other words, the change is not about preventing code mingling or license changing. Multiple-licensing is actually left to the governance of the open source project in question, just like it actually is with the MPL. Exhibit A doesn't create a need for the original developer to multiple-license nor a right for downstream developers to vary the license the original developer uses. Even if it had been left intact, it would not have placed a duty on Sun to offer multiple licenses (which they still could in a separate contributor agreement), nor would it have given you or anyone else the right to vary the license after the fact.
Thus I'd assert that your original claim ( "The mozilla license has a paragraph that says: you can convert this license to the GPL and mix it with GPL software legally.") is a misreading and that Sun hasn't done the damage you assert (at least not here).
> If Sun didn't plan to do anything in the face of Linux,
> they would not have promoted their grant as one to all
> Open Source developers.
Personally, while I find the press release to leave plenty of questions unanswered and to be phrased for reading outside the developer community, I didn't come to the same conclusion you did when I read it and can't see why you do. It's just clueless PR-speak, not grand conspiracy by an evil genius.
On the subject of OpenOffice.org, what has copyright aggregation to do with patents? It's pretty common practice (Apache demands it for example) and is about the governance of the community, not the defence of patent suits. I agree that the Microsoft settlement left a bad taste but I don't think it was part of grand conspiracy, just a deep desire to end a crippling lawsuit. If it's Microsoft contracts and money that influence your judgement of the F/OSS motives of a company then surely this site should have you looking at some other gift-horses too?
Sun and Microsoft shaking hands is a little like two boxers tapping gloves just before they beat the living daylights out of each other.
> I'm just trying to figure out how they are going to
> make anything of Open Solaris in the face of Linux
How about if actually the plan with OpenSolaris doesn't actually involve doing anything "in the face of Linux"? Sun actually talks about the existing Solaris customer base and community in connection with OpenSolaris - all the anti-Linux spin comes from Linux advocates and the ever-balanced trade press.
Maybe there's a case for taking the OpenSolaris FAQ in good faith rather than assuming the worst (even if that's more PC on SlashDot)?
> I think that what we are seeing is the prelude to a patent > lawsuit against Linux developers.
Sun doesn't have a track record of software patent litigation against anyone much, least of all individuals. What makes you think that is about to end? Do you have evidence or is that just think-the-worst speaking?
> The mozilla license has a paragraph that says: you can convert
> this license to the GPL and mix it with GPL software legally.
> Sun deleted that paragraph
I checked the red-line diff between the CDDL and MPL and I can't see any such paragraph. Please explain.
Maybe the poster reads the press more often than you? Sun has repeatedly said that the license for Open Solaris will be an OSI approved license (even the sceptics admit it).
Slashdot Mirror
Sun actually supports Harmony and said so the day it was announced - VNU has it wrong (as usual). Congratulations, you found the only report that neglected to mention that both the senior Sun engineer responsible for Java strategy and the person responsible for future open source strategy at Sun both expressed support for harmony at a level pretty similar to IBM's support ("jolly good, and we may contribute at some point in the future"). While Gosling's misreported off-the-cuff comments make for good tabloid sensationalism they don't represent Sun's official view.
Yes, those are the sort of provisions I'd want to see. Combinability also needs to be addressed. The other strength of MPL-style licenses is that they allow a binary to be built from a mix of licenses.
What version of Solaris are you running? Most of the x86 performance issues I'm aware of have been addressed in Solaris 10 and the people I hear from tell me the speed differential you're describing has gone away.
So let me be perfectly clear. Sun has never been a patent terrorist and does not intend to start now. Sun accumulates patents in parallel with software development in just the same way that all US corporations do - it would be irresponsible to do otherwise. However, our policy is to grant these patents to the communities around the software they relate to.
If you read the license that you are granted by the Java specifications, you'll find that they give you an unrestricted blanket grant of all the patents Sun has that might be infringed by Java implementations. The same is true of the CDDL and OpenSolaris - if you work in the OpenSolaris commons, you have the full use and protection of Sun's patents. As more companies work in that commons, the CDDL will force them to donate all their patents too. Those grants survive anything that may happen to the companies involved, so even a hostile acquisition would not result in the loss of patent protection. Blanket grant provisions incrementally build a meshed patent commons that promises safety for developers and as it grows offers protection against patent terrorism.
Until we're able to reform the patent system (and Sun is a firm believer in patent reform and is working behind the scenes in Europe too to promote sanity) the smart thing to do is not to neglect patents, any more than it would be smart for a policeman who opposed gun ownership to protest by not wearing body armour. However, I think the F/OSS meta-community should show zero tolerance for patent holders who don't give the communities in which they work blanket protection from their patent holdings.
This does not mean I want to see lots of individual patents in some way made public. Software patents are deeply flawed and breach the social contract implied by patenting because they do not usually provide the know-how in a way that the public commons is enriched. Software patents are not sources of either sample code or of inspiration. Instead, I want to see corporations forced to donate all patents that are used by the various code commons they care about, with a blanket, unenumerated, blind grant and an enforceable patent peace. That's why I am a fan of the MPL/CDDL!
That's why I'm also not a proponent of multiple licensing - yes, I have considered it. If people could use the GPL as their license, they would not have to contribute to the patent commons surrounding OpenSolaris or be subject to its patent peace provisions. Multiple licenses are great all the time they share values, but I am so committed to creating a patent-safe developer commons around OpenSolaris that I feel it would be a bad idea to multi-license CDDL-licensed code until the GPL has suitably strong patent provisions. Once the GPL becomes combinable and includes patent protection, I would be very happy to revisit this view.
I couldn't agree more. For what it's worth, I am not too worried which MPL-derivative license becomes the one 'template' license that everyone uses. I would be very pleased to work on MPL 2, if that would be more 'politically acceptable'. As I have made clear on my blog, I believe that the MPL license family brings the greatest freedom while preserving the value of the commons, so I think it would be a mistake to allow zealots to misguidely extinguish it.
At Sun, we couldn't wait for a template MPL to be created independently for OpenSolaris because we were very keen to get the existing global Solaris community in a position to work with the code, but there's frankly no obstacle in the future to working on a 'blessed' reusable license in the MPL family. What I hope the CDDL makes impossible is the creation of any more 'vanity' clones of the MPL. If anyone tries, they deserve the full wrath of the meta-community.
Assuming you are referring to my blog entry discussing the way that the success, not failure, of MPL-style licenses is at the root of the license proliferation problem, I'm afraid I don't agree with you. LGPL does not include the explicit patent grant that the MPL includes, nor does it establish ground rules for maintaining a patent peace, and thus does not serve as the archetype for MPL licenses and their (many) derivatives. Instead it includes an exception to the scope of the GPL which depends on the language and architecture of the software in use and makes assumptions on how dynamic linking will take place. In all other respects it is the same as my third license category, GPL licenses.
OpenSolaris will be a full, buildable system with as few components as possible (mainly drivers) available only as binary when it launches this quarter. The pilot program is already testing and building the code (Ben Rockwood, for example) and has started thinking laterally about new potential distributions like PPC.
Sun refers to the architecture as Chip-level Multi-Threading (CMT) and according to the white paper, while there are indeed multiple cores, each can also multi-thread:
Cache also seems to have been considered:
So while breathless enthusiasm may not be in order, a certain level of optimism seems warranted :-)
Since the Pentium 4 according to Intel, but it's not a good question as that's Intel's trademarked term for their two-thread implementation of simultaneous multithreading:
By contrast, Niagara is implementing Chip-level multiprocessing:
In other words, Niagara implements in hardware, at greater scale, what Pentium 4 offers as an emulation feature. In theory one could SMP on top of CMP chipsets for even greater throughput. If you find the Sun article too hard, the Wikipedia references I have cited will probably prove much easier to understand.
I agree. This whole hypefest may be a storm in a thimble but it reinforces the need to use an end-to-end encryption that you control. Personally I think Ethereal is a more real threat than the AOL ToS but the solution is the same.
For encryption, I'm not an advocate of gaim-encryption as the answer. It means that people all need to use Gaim and that's just not practical. Personally I think OTR is a better option. As well as a GAIM plug-in it offers a proxy so that any IM tool can be made secure, and it addresses the weaknesses gaim-encryption ignores - from their FAQ:
Best of all, it's dead simple to use.Totally worth it. As an earlier post pointed out, the EP is actually highly aggravated by the actions of the Council of Ministers in approving the Directive without their amendments. Groklaw has the EP's press release on the subject and it's clear the EP is mad as hell - the language borders on the undiplomatic, which for Europe is very unusual.
The reason this upsets the EP is that if the decision is allowed to stand it sets a precedent for binding legislation to be created in Council without any recourse for elected assemblies - if the EP doesn't manage to get all MEPs in the room to vote it down now, the thing will pass unaltered and all EU states will be compelled to implement it as law.
So, for the first time, we can really make a difference by writing to MEPs and ensuring they are aware that this is a big deal for their constituents. The political trap is set, it's up to us to spring it. Personally I have already gone to WriteToThem and written to my MEPs, it was very easy.
So what is Linux? Yes, clinically it is just the kernel but when the discussion is around "running Linux" people mean the whole distribution. That depends on XFree86 and for many people depends also on Gnome, for a subset it depends on OpenOffice.org as well.
Just because you hate Sun don't diss the real contributions they make to Linux by paying for engineers to contribute significantly to Gnome, X, and all the other stuff most Linux users depend on every day.
I see you have a link in your sig to my work blog. While I'm flattered, there are two problems with that:
Thanks!
S.
(Mods & meta-mods: Sorry, only way I can find to communicate over this one)
Take a look at the actual project. You'll find it's all Java code, and that it uses Java 3D as an generalisation layer to control the video card. So actually a vindication of the virtualisation concept, yes.
I think the problem is companies like Sun with their silly, free-till-we-get-our-hooks-in-you licenses.
OK, I'll bite. How do you justify that opinion? Exactly which OSI-approved licenses written by Sun do you believe to be deceptive and why?
Actually there's already a very active gaming group at Sun, led by their Chief Gaming Officer. There are already a few commercial Java-based games around and I think there are more in the pipeline.
> Aggregation may have something to do with "governance"
Yes, as the FAQ states and as you point out it's so that a single entity is able to act on behalf of the community to defend (or prosecute) copyright license violations (that FAQ isn't precise, I agree). As you and I both know copyright and patents are very different, and this aggregation is not related to patents in any useful way. As far as I know no-one has come up with any meaningful defence against the capricious and broken software patent system created by case law.
> You should be aware that I have been critical of IBM and its patents
Yes, I am aware of and grateful for that, thank-you. My comment was related to the current context where IBM's community manipulation has had little critical evaluation even by RMS (who I assume will be working on GNU Fastenings with IBM's tamper-proof screw patent as we speak).
> then they reneged upon that promise.
I prefer to think they've just not got round to it yet for lack of funds in that business unit (it's a big deal financially). But I agree with you on this one, I would rather see the interests separated too.
You're conflating two concerns here, the fear of a patent infringement lawsuit and the mistrust of Sun as a steward of OpenOffice.org.
Sun, like Apache, aggregates copyrights so it can manage the codebase effectively and defend license violations. I believe both Sun and Apache are right to do this and that it's sound practice to get contributor agreements and copyright assignments from committers.
Contributor agreements are the best anyone can do right now defending against patents. When it comes to a patent infringement lawsuit, the stupidity of the patent system means that no-one can anticipate it ("no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition", as Monty Python observed). To rephrase your example, if Apache were to be shut down by patent lawsuits, IBM Websphere would happily carry on rolling independently of it - in fact that's one of the strengths of open source. The possibility of that in no way implies either that Apache should not aggregate copyrights for good governance or that IBM should not sit on the Apache board.
Your concern therefore seems to boil down to not liking Sun being the steward of openoffice.org. Understood. I'll work on it.
But the deletion of 'exhibit A' is explained in the detailed rationale thus:
In other words, the change is not about preventing code mingling or license changing. Multiple-licensing is actually left to the governance of the open source project in question, just like it actually is with the MPL. Exhibit A doesn't create a need for the original developer to multiple-license nor a right for downstream developers to vary the license the original developer uses. Even if it had been left intact, it would not have placed a duty on Sun to offer multiple licenses (which they still could in a separate contributor agreement), nor would it have given you or anyone else the right to vary the license after the fact.
Thus I'd assert that your original claim ( "The mozilla license has a paragraph that says: you can convert this license to the GPL and mix it with GPL software legally.") is a misreading and that Sun hasn't done the damage you assert (at least not here).
> If Sun didn't plan to do anything in the face of Linux,
> they would not have promoted their grant as one to all
> Open Source developers.
Personally, while I find the press release to leave plenty of questions unanswered and to be phrased for reading outside the developer community, I didn't come to the same conclusion you did when I read it and can't see why you do. It's just clueless PR-speak, not grand conspiracy by an evil genius.
On the subject of OpenOffice.org, what has copyright aggregation to do with patents? It's pretty common practice (Apache demands it for example) and is about the governance of the community, not the defence of patent suits. I agree that the Microsoft settlement left a bad taste but I don't think it was part of grand conspiracy, just a deep desire to end a crippling lawsuit. If it's Microsoft contracts and money that influence your judgement of the F/OSS motives of a company then surely this site should have you looking at some other gift-horses too?
> new buddies MS
Hardly buddies - Scott McNealy said:
> I'm just trying to figure out how they are going to
> make anything of Open Solaris in the face of Linux
How about if actually the plan with OpenSolaris doesn't actually involve doing anything "in the face of Linux"? Sun actually talks about the existing Solaris customer base and community in connection with OpenSolaris - all the anti-Linux spin comes from Linux advocates and the ever-balanced trade press.
Maybe there's a case for taking the OpenSolaris FAQ in good faith rather than assuming the worst (even if that's more PC on SlashDot)?
> I think that what we are seeing is the prelude to a patent
> lawsuit against Linux developers.
Sun doesn't have a track record of software patent litigation against anyone much, least of all individuals. What makes you think that is about to end? Do you have evidence or is that just think-the-worst speaking?
> The mozilla license has a paragraph that says: you can convert
> this license to the GPL and mix it with GPL software legally.
> Sun deleted that paragraph
I checked the red-line diff between the CDDL and MPL and I can't see any such paragraph. Please explain.
DTrace is under 1Mb so doesn't need a torrent. You can get the source in one small tarball.
S.
Maybe the poster reads the press more often than you? Sun has repeatedly said that the license for Open Solaris will be an OSI approved license (even the sceptics admit it).