Unfortunately the CDDL which seems to be a deliberately more "patent friendly" license will never be safe to use;
I call either sheer FUD or that you havn't actually read the CDDL.
since Sun practically admits that it may contain patented code that they have the right to redistribute but that forks of their project couldn't.
This is absolute FUD. The CDDL *requires* the originator and contributors to automatically give patent grants, for good, to that CDDL code and its deratives - non-revocable.
See also what RMS has to say about OpenSolaris: Peculiar licence he says (cause it isn't GPL) but he uses the word "free" several times, not a word RMS applies to software lightly.
Note that one of the things that seems likely for the GPLv3 are patent provisions for a patent pool, similar to what the CDDL does.
--paulj
Sun employee (not speaking for Sun), FSF supporter.
Now Solaris is free (kinda, I have reservations about the license).
It's free full stop. Even RMS says it's now a "free" OS (but a "peculiar" licence in his words, see RMS' article in ZDNet on Sun). RMS isn't exactly noted for using the word "free" in a loose way. If he says the licence is "free" (albeit peculiar to him because it isn't GPL), exactly what is it in the CDDL which causes you to have reservations about it?
That means people have Solaris code available to them.
No, it means they're free to do what they want with it. Solaris source has not been/that/ hard to get, lots of people outside Sun have had it available to them for/long/ time. Now, additionally, they're free to hack on it, extend and do almost whatever they like (The CDDL doesn't try to reach into other non-CDDL or CDDL-derived files, as the GPL tries to. Indeed, if you were a BSD person you might say the CDDL is more free than the GPL;) ).
Can we say it is a Solaris with the Linux name?
Or vice versa.
More competition in the "Free-nix" world is never a bad thing. BSD, Linux, OpenSolaris. Sounds good to me.
--paulj
NB: I work for Sun, but I don't claim to speak for Sun.
The new push will be to have 8 very simple cores (albeit with advanced SSE4 units with even wider vector instructions such as 256 or 512 bits) and allow each core to run 2 or 4 threads. This won't be hyperthreading as hyperthreading is a form of SMT (although Intel may reuse the name). It will be a form of fine-grained multithreading that allows context switches on L1 or L2 cache misses, as well as other latent operations. Of course their will also be logic to allow all the threads to run equally.
Apart from SSE4, you've just described Suns'Niagara processor. See this blog entry of Jonathan Schwartz's for some nice pictures.
They're "teardrop" shaped in order to minimize G-loading on the way in and out of the loop, not to provide maximum weightlessness time.
Good point.
The reason they reach a minimum of speed at the top is because that's how the conversion of kinetic to potential to kinetic energy works. When something goes up, and it has no additional force being added (no energy is added except by the lift chains in a roller coaster), then it slows down. So it is slowest at the highest points, just like in the non-inverted sections of the track.
Yes, bad wording on my part. The speed is always at a minimum at the top of the loop, obviously. I meant rather they might try deliberately aim to make this minimum as close to 0 as possible in order to get that 'weightless' effect.
That means the car is accelerating downward faster than gravity pulls.
Nope, that's impossible. The car is accelerating towards the centre of the loop, driven by gravity.
As such, if you barfed at the top, it would merely fall to your feet, just like normal.
Sorry, no. Once the barf leaves your mouth, it no longer has any thrust applied to it by the car (or rather, by the occupant of the car who barfed) it will simply fall downward, as gravity demands (along with whatever horizontal component due to inertia).
Now, if the coaster had a double corkscrew after the loop like many early loopers did, the barf would I believe come off the floor there, because I think those are negative G.
Nope, once the barf is out of the person's mouth the only possible path it can take it ballistic (ignoring friction, eg of air), the only force which can act on the barf is gravity. That force + its inertia determine where it will go.
The vomit and rollercoaster problem involves two paths (one ballistic) and determining where they intersect.. slightly more involved than determining single ballistic path.
I remember when our physics teacher (Dr Van den Broeke - best teacher ever) decided to demonstrate elasticity and conversion to/from kinetic energy via elasticity. He brought one of those bouncy balls into class and proceeded to demonstrate by imparting ever greater thrusts on the ball, starting with gravity from a small height and finishing with him throwing the ball with force at the wall, resulting in a room of full of laughing students having to duck for cover as the damn ball bounced everywhere;)
1. If we exclude gravity from consideration, the vomit would travel at a tangent to the circle, not away from the centre of the circle. That is to say, once you remove centripetal force, it simply goes 'forward' as momentum demands (for it to go 'away' from the centre of the circle, ie go outside of the 'far' side of the tangent to the circle) would require some other additional acceleration, which isnt there. (gravity excluded)). Hence, if the vomit is let go at the very top of the loop, we would expect it to travel horizontally forward, given that the tangent to the top of the circle meets the circle at a point on the vertical axis of the circle, and the tangent hence must be a horizontal axis.
(we ignore fact the person could, in vomiting, impart a thrust on the vomit - it could be any direction, so cant be generally accounted for. We'll just presume any such thrust will be relatively insignificant (which seems likely, to a degree.)).
If we add in gravity, the vomit will simply accelerate towards the ground at 9.8m/s**2, as well as moving horizontally, according to its horizontal inertia.
2. Roller coaster rides which loop typically are designed so that they approach a minimum of speed at the top of the loop, for maximum "weightless" effect (ie to 'hang' at the top of the loop), this is why most of them are oval shaped with the long chord of the oval aligned vertically, rather than circular.
Hence, if you vomit at the top of the loop, on many rides, there will be a minimum of inertia to carry the loop horizontally outside of the loop. Gravity immediately starts acting on the vomit and also the coaster to start accelerating it down the other side of the loop.
With a modicum of thought (ie consider it is the same force accelerating both of them) you should realise that it's very plausible that the vomit will strike the coaster again somewhere near the bottom, offset slightly by whatever horizontal inertia the vomit had (which might be quite small, for many roller coasters).
Calculating exactly where the vomit will hit the coaster (ignoring air friction, as always) sounds like a really interesting basic problem to give students learning Newtonian mechanics.;)
This seems unlikely to me - the Shuttle has had an automatic landing system since the late 80's and my understanding is landings are completely automated.
Being a dumb teenager is one thing. Causing world disruption is something else entirely (Yes. I know. The victims bear some responsibility)
How about, instead of blaming a dumb teenager for acting like a dumb teenager - taking the vendor to task who is responsible for this OS deployed so far and wide across the world and so insecure that a dumb teenager can cause such disruption with just some copying&pasting!
I find it strange that no one asks "How come a kid was able to do this?".
The problem with no directive is that it then leaves in place ability to lobby individual countries to allow software patents in their jurisdictions, for those countries which don't already allow them (I think Ireland, UK and Germany already allow them, I vaguely recall). The European Patent Office also already allows software patents.
Any future harmonisation directive will then be even more difficult to pass, if it does not allow software patents.
"The Secret Island of Dr. Destructo" on the old home 8bit computers. I played it to death on my old CPC6128, and I still fire it up every now and then under emulation - would do more often if the CPC emulator key repsonse weren't as slow.
It was a 2D side-view shoot-em up where you controlled a little plane and had to shoot down a variety of planes, bombers and helicopters and by making them crash into the ship or island on the screen, sink the island/ship.
I've never seen a game with the sprite control of Dr. Destructo: Very unusual, z made the plan circle anti-clockwise, x clockwise, such that you could loop and bank all over the screen. Very very effective.
But SCO's has presented arguments in court specifically claiming the GPL itself to be invalid.
Completely seperate from their claims of infringment in the linux kernel.
If they believe the GPL is invalid, then they cant accept to be bound by it, hence they have no right to distribute GPL licenced software. Simple. MySQL should sue them, using their own SCOvsIBM arguments as evidence.
if I had any modpoints left, I'd mod you down.... He's managing systems across a WAN, it should be obvious that that's even less a solution than Synaptic suggested.
It's a much better solution. Granted it'd take time to plan and implement and familiarise users with new software, but in the long run - much better solution.
Note that I gave the URL for ClamWin, which would be a 'quick' (well, quicker) solution. I've havn't used ClamWin extensively, but its light enough to run on windows running under Qemu without noticeable effect, and ClamAV on Unix has worked amazingly well for me in keeping mailboxes I administer free of Windows virus crap. Also free. If his existing AV software sucks, he could try that.
However, in the long run, trying to work around frustration after frustration in programmes which apparently are in a battle to run the clock out on Moore's "law", whose only reason for existing is the awful security of the OS they run on, the other options on my list are definitely better solutions, in the long run.
It is not a requirement of the license to do so, unlike the CDDL, which requires it.... By license, you MUST give Sun full copyright to those changes you just made. You are now both hold co-copyright to the same code (a murkly legal area to defend).
This is completely untrue.
There is absolutely no requirement that you must assign joint rights to Sun in the CDDL. The assign-joint-rights-to-Sun thing is only if you wish to have your OpenSolaris modifications included back in Solaris (and OpenSolaris, at least for as long as OpenSolaris reflects Sun's internal Solaris OS/Net tree).
What do you do? What if they see YOU releasing a "competing" product based on the same exact code that you gave Sun fully copyright to? Does Sun defend you in a lawsuit? Not likely.
This is absolute crappola. If you sign Sun's contributor agreement (and you don'thave to), you still retain your rights in the copyright of the code.
Its best to stay away from it, its very shady and almost impossible to defend legally.
You state this based on uninformed, if not deliberately false, FUD. Also, if you have a genuine problem with the contributor agreement, try raise the issue on a relevant OpenSolaris list (your claims above were based on incorrect premise at least).
No, I'm referrring to the fact that the hackers on arch/foo tend to be a different set of hackers than those who work on arch/foo. Hence "FOO must be worse than BAR because arch/foo has more swearing about the quality of the hardware" is simply not a safe conclusion. That's all..
Or could it just be that code under a certain arch/ tends to have been written by a specific subset of kernel hackers?
Eg, if arch/ppc64 is profanity free and arch/sparc is a swamp of cursewords-in-comments, then maybe the correct conclusion to take from it is that the SPARC hackers simply tend to swear more than the IBM hackers? (Ie, the Linux SPARC hackers, ie mainly David S Miller, never did that work under corporate auspices. While the IBM PPC64 hackers are all posting their diffs from @XX.ibm.com email addresses - seems to me that could be a big factor;) ).
Any other conclusions seem unsafe to me. I don't think the swearing, or lack of it, says much about the hardware.
Did you notice that more than half of that source file is completely unparsed, ignored, because of the undef at the top (the one commentedy by the 'shit')
Ehm, that doesn't appear to true. Just part_to_hack() and a few other lines are left out.
Whomever writes code like that needs to get back to CompSci 101.
The P0_WA parts should really have been removed and left to gather dust in SCCS, however the rest of it looks ok to me at a glance - at least in terms of basic style and structure.
the CDDL specifically prohibits me from learning anything from looking at the OpenSolaris code.
This is untrue and absurd.
Because its covered by a "file-based" license, I can either take files in full, or not at all.
This is again untrue.
The CDDL licence allows you to modify CDDL code, as long as the resulting file is CDDL licenced. So you can take a file, strip out stuff you're not interested in and use that (under the CDDL licence).
I am not covered by the CDDL (and would be in violation of it) by taking snippets of code from any of the files,
This is untrue.
You may take CDDL code and use it as you wish, provided the resulting file is also CDDL licenced. You can have your code link to this CDDL code, and your code can be under whatever licence you like.
including viewing them and "paraphrasing" what I learn back into my own code.
Untrue.
You are allowed to do this, provided that the files which were modifications of CDDL code stay under the CDDL. Your own code you may licence as you wish. If rather you mean that you want to "steal" CDDL code, modify it and bury it in your own proprietary licenced application well, sorry, no, you can't do that - no more than you could with MPL or GPL licenced code.
Also, there ARE patented concepts in the OpenSolaris code, which you are welcome to use, as long as you use entire files (i.e. covered by the "file-based" license).
Correct, and you may also modify those files, provided the modified files are made available under the terms of the CDDL.
I don't want to put any of my clients or projects at risk, so I can't look at the code.
At risk of what exactly? Your tendencies to want to take other people's code and relicence it? Your email address says '@gnu-designs.com', but I wonder if actually you're a BSD licence fan.:) Note that patents are applicable regardless of whether you have looked at the code implementing them. Even if you don't know about the patent, they still apply. (However, willfully breaking a patent tends to result in higher damages).
So nope, I haven't even looked at the code, because frankly, I can't, without contaminating my own code and ideas.
Looking at CDDL code is not going to do that.
Note that copyright does not disallow you to look and reimplement. Note further that not looking does not protect you against patent claims.
If you truly were concerned about protecting your clients from patent risks in your own code, then your safest bet would be to take the CDDL code and link to it: with your own code under whatever licence you want, the CDDL code implementing the patent and providing you and your users with a grant to use the patent.
You havn't fallen for the FUD put about by a certain libc hacker have you? (Who just happens to work for a competitor of Sun's? Pure coincidence of course..).
If he looks at BSD internals, anything he comes up with relation to those internals might be considered derivative works and would need to be BSD licensed.
How is this marked insightful? The poster above me is completely wrong. The BSD licence *allows* you to not only derive and licence as you wish, but even take the code, unmodified, and relicence it, as you wish.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately the CDDL which seems to be a deliberately more "patent friendly" license will never be safe to use;
I call either sheer FUD or that you havn't actually read the CDDL.
since Sun practically admits that it may contain patented code that they have the right to redistribute but that forks of their project couldn't.
This is absolute FUD. The CDDL *requires* the originator and contributors to automatically give patent grants, for good, to that CDDL code and its deratives - non-revocable.
See also what RMS has to say about OpenSolaris: Peculiar licence he says (cause it isn't GPL) but he uses the word "free" several times, not a word RMS applies to software lightly.
Note that one of the things that seems likely for the GPLv3 are patent provisions for a patent pool, similar to what the CDDL does.
--paulj
Sun employee (not speaking for Sun), FSF supporter.
Now Solaris is free (kinda, I have reservations about the license).
/that/ hard to get, lots of people outside Sun have had it available to them for /long/ time. Now, additionally, they're free to hack on it, extend and do almost whatever they like (The CDDL doesn't try to reach into other non-CDDL or CDDL-derived files, as the GPL tries to. Indeed, if you were a BSD person you might say the CDDL is more free than the GPL ;) ).
It's free full stop. Even RMS says it's now a "free" OS (but a "peculiar" licence in his words, see RMS' article in ZDNet on Sun). RMS isn't exactly noted for using the word "free" in a loose way. If he says the licence is "free" (albeit peculiar to him because it isn't GPL), exactly what is it in the CDDL which causes you to have reservations about it?
That means people have Solaris code available to them.
No, it means they're free to do what they want with it. Solaris source has not been
Can we say it is a Solaris with the Linux name?
Or vice versa.
More competition in the "Free-nix" world is never a bad thing. BSD, Linux, OpenSolaris. Sounds good to me.
--paulj
NB: I work for Sun, but I don't claim to speak for Sun.
How so exactly?
The licence is OSI approved and even RMS has called OpenSolaris "Free".
Stop spreading FUD. You likely havn't even read the licence given what you just wrote.
The new push will be to have 8 very simple cores (albeit with advanced SSE4 units with even wider vector instructions such as 256 or 512 bits) and allow each core to run 2 or 4 threads. This won't be hyperthreading as hyperthreading is a form of SMT (although Intel may reuse the name). It will be a form of fine-grained multithreading that allows context switches on L1 or L2 cache misses, as well as other latent operations. Of course their will also be logic to allow all the threads to run equally.
Apart from SSE4, you've just described Suns' Niagara processor. See this blog entry of Jonathan Schwartz's for some nice pictures.
--paulj
They're "teardrop" shaped in order to minimize G-loading on the way in and out of the loop, not to provide maximum weightlessness time.
Good point.
The reason they reach a minimum of speed at the top is because that's how the conversion of kinetic to potential to kinetic energy works. When something goes up, and it has no additional force being added (no energy is added except by the lift chains in a roller coaster), then it slows down. So it is slowest at the highest points, just like in the non-inverted sections of the track.
Yes, bad wording on my part. The speed is always at a minimum at the top of the loop, obviously. I meant rather they might try deliberately aim to make this minimum as close to 0 as possible in order to get that 'weightless' effect.
That means the car is accelerating downward faster than gravity pulls.
Nope, that's impossible. The car is accelerating towards the centre of the loop, driven by gravity.
As such, if you barfed at the top, it would merely fall to your feet, just like normal.
Sorry, no. Once the barf leaves your mouth, it no longer has any thrust applied to it by the car (or rather, by the occupant of the car who barfed) it will simply fall downward, as gravity demands (along with whatever horizontal component due to inertia).
Now, if the coaster had a double corkscrew after the loop like many early loopers did, the barf would I believe come off the floor there, because I think those are negative G.
Nope, once the barf is out of the person's mouth the only possible path it can take it ballistic (ignoring friction, eg of air), the only force which can act on the barf is gravity. That force + its inertia determine where it will go.
:)
The vomit and rollercoaster problem involves two paths (one ballistic) and determining where they intersect.. slightly more involved than determining single ballistic path.
I remember when our physics teacher (Dr Van den Broeke - best teacher ever) decided to demonstrate elasticity and conversion to/from kinetic energy via elasticity. He brought one of those bouncy balls into class and proceeded to demonstrate by imparting ever greater thrusts on the ball, starting with gravity from a small height and finishing with him throwing the ball with force at the wall, resulting in a room of full of laughing students having to duck for cover as the damn ball bounced everywhere ;)
Great fun.
Two points:
;)
1. If we exclude gravity from consideration, the vomit would travel at a tangent to the circle, not away from the centre of the circle. That is to say, once you remove centripetal force, it simply goes 'forward' as momentum demands (for it to go 'away' from the centre of the circle, ie go outside of the 'far' side of the tangent to the circle) would require some other additional acceleration, which isnt there. (gravity excluded)). Hence, if the vomit is let go at the very top of the loop, we would expect it to travel horizontally forward, given that the tangent to the top of the circle meets the circle at a point on the vertical axis of the circle, and the tangent hence must be a horizontal axis.
(we ignore fact the person could, in vomiting, impart a thrust on the vomit - it could be any direction, so cant be generally accounted for. We'll just presume any such thrust will be relatively insignificant (which seems likely, to a degree.)).
If we add in gravity, the vomit will simply accelerate towards the ground at 9.8m/s**2, as well as moving horizontally, according to its horizontal inertia.
2. Roller coaster rides which loop typically are designed so that they approach a minimum of speed at the top of the loop, for maximum "weightless" effect (ie to 'hang' at the top of the loop), this is why most of them are oval shaped with the long chord of the oval aligned vertically, rather than circular.
Hence, if you vomit at the top of the loop, on many rides, there will be a minimum of inertia to carry the loop horizontally outside of the loop. Gravity immediately starts acting on the vomit and also the coaster to start accelerating it down the other side of the loop.
With a modicum of thought (ie consider it is the same force accelerating both of them) you should realise that it's very plausible that the vomit will strike the coaster again somewhere near the bottom, offset slightly by whatever horizontal inertia the vomit had (which might be quite small, for many roller coasters).
Calculating exactly where the vomit will hit the coaster (ignoring air friction, as always) sounds like a really interesting basic problem to give students learning Newtonian mechanics.
This seems unlikely to me - the Shuttle has had an automatic landing system since the late 80's and my understanding is landings are completely automated.
I'd say that's your tough luck for:
a) running windows
b) not applying the patches which your vendor had already made available
Being a dumb teenager is one thing. Causing world disruption is something else entirely (Yes. I know. The victims bear some responsibility)
How about, instead of blaming a dumb teenager for acting like a dumb teenager - taking the vendor to task who is responsible for this OS deployed so far and wide across the world and so insecure that a dumb teenager can cause such disruption with just some copying&pasting!
I find it strange that no one asks "How come a kid was able to do this?".
--paulj
The problem with no directive is that it then leaves in place ability to lobby individual countries to allow software patents in their jurisdictions, for those countries which don't already allow them (I think Ireland, UK and Germany already allow them, I vaguely recall). The European Patent Office also already allows software patents.
Any future harmonisation directive will then be even more difficult to pass, if it does not allow software patents.
So we want a good directive ASAP.
I googled for "Two Tigers" and wow, yes, that looks *very* much like SIoDD. I never realised!
I'll keep an eye out for MAME ROMs, thanks!
"The Secret Island of Dr. Destructo" on the old home 8bit computers. I played it to death on my old CPC6128, and I still fire it up every now and then under emulation - would do more often if the CPC emulator key repsonse weren't as slow.
It was a 2D side-view shoot-em up where you controlled a little plane and had to shoot down a variety of planes, bombers and helicopters and by making them crash into the ship or island on the screen, sink the island/ship.
I've never seen a game with the sprite control of Dr. Destructo: Very unusual, z made the plan circle anti-clockwise, x clockwise, such that you could loop and bank all over the screen. Very very effective.
Great little game.
All of those are essentially BSD/MIT style licences, no?
Got any examples of actual substantive licences which do more than, essentially, "Retain copyright, credits please" which are GPL compatible?
But SCO's has presented arguments in court specifically claiming the GPL itself to be invalid.
Completely seperate from their claims of infringment in the linux kernel.
If they believe the GPL is invalid, then they cant accept to be bound by it, hence they have no right to distribute GPL licenced software. Simple. MySQL should sue them, using their own SCOvsIBM arguments as evidence.
if I had any modpoints left, I'd mod you down. ... He's managing systems across a WAN, it should be obvious that that's even less a solution than Synaptic suggested.
It's a much better solution. Granted it'd take time to plan and implement and familiarise users with new software, but in the long run - much better solution.
Note that I gave the URL for ClamWin, which would be a 'quick' (well, quicker) solution. I've havn't used ClamWin extensively, but its light enough to run on windows running under Qemu without noticeable effect, and ClamAV on Unix has worked amazingly well for me in keeping mailboxes I administer free of Windows virus crap. Also free. If his existing AV software sucks, he could try that.
However, in the long run, trying to work around frustration after frustration in programmes which apparently are in a battle to run the clock out on Moore's "law", whose only reason for existing is the awful security of the OS they run on, the other options on my list are definitely better solutions, in the long run.
--paulj
Any advice? Solutions?
Pick one or more of the above natural remedies for your MS related affliction...
It is not a requirement of the license to do so, unlike the CDDL, which requires it. ... By license, you MUST give Sun full copyright to those changes you just made. You are now both hold co-copyright to the same code (a murkly legal area to defend).
This is completely untrue.
There is absolutely no requirement that you must assign joint rights to Sun in the CDDL. The assign-joint-rights-to-Sun thing is only if you wish to have your OpenSolaris modifications included back in Solaris (and OpenSolaris, at least for as long as OpenSolaris reflects Sun's internal Solaris OS/Net tree).
What do you do? What if they see YOU releasing a "competing" product based on the same exact code that you gave Sun fully copyright to? Does Sun defend you in a lawsuit? Not likely.
This is absolute crappola. If you sign Sun's contributor agreement (and you don't have to), you still retain your rights in the copyright of the code.
Its best to stay away from it, its very shady and almost impossible to defend legally.
You state this based on uninformed, if not deliberately false, FUD. Also, if you have a genuine problem with the contributor agreement, try raise the issue on a relevant OpenSolaris list (your claims above were based on incorrect premise at least).
No, I'm referrring to the fact that the hackers on arch/foo tend to be a different set of hackers than those who work on arch/foo. Hence "FOO must be worse than BAR because arch/foo has more swearing about the quality of the hardware" is simply not a safe conclusion. That's all..
Or could it just be that code under a certain arch/ tends to have been written by a specific subset of kernel hackers?
;) ).
Eg, if arch/ppc64 is profanity free and arch/sparc is a swamp of cursewords-in-comments, then maybe the correct conclusion to take from it is that the SPARC hackers simply tend to swear more than the IBM hackers? (Ie, the Linux SPARC hackers, ie mainly David S Miller, never did that work under corporate auspices. While the IBM PPC64 hackers are all posting their diffs from @XX.ibm.com email addresses - seems to me that could be a big factor
Any other conclusions seem unsafe to me. I don't think the swearing, or lack of it, says much about the hardware.
Did you notice that more than half of that source file is completely unparsed, ignored, because of the undef at the top (the one commentedy by the 'shit')
Ehm, that doesn't appear to true. Just part_to_hack() and a few other lines are left out.
Whomever writes code like that needs to get back to CompSci 101.
The P0_WA parts should really have been removed and left to gather dust in SCCS, however the rest of it looks ok to me at a glance - at least in terms of basic style and structure.
the CDDL specifically prohibits me from learning anything from looking at the OpenSolaris code.
:) Note that patents are applicable regardless of whether you have looked at the code implementing them. Even if you don't know about the patent, they still apply. (However, willfully breaking a patent tends to result in higher damages).
This is untrue and absurd.
Because its covered by a "file-based" license, I can either take files in full, or not at all.
This is again untrue.
The CDDL licence allows you to modify CDDL code, as long as the resulting file is CDDL licenced. So you can take a file, strip out stuff you're not interested in and use that (under the CDDL licence).
I am not covered by the CDDL (and would be in violation of it) by taking snippets of code from any of the files,
This is untrue.
You may take CDDL code and use it as you wish, provided the resulting file is also CDDL licenced. You can have your code link to this CDDL code, and your code can be under whatever licence you like.
including viewing them and "paraphrasing" what I learn back into my own code.
Untrue.
You are allowed to do this, provided that the files which were modifications of CDDL code stay under the CDDL. Your own code you may licence as you wish. If rather you mean that you want to "steal" CDDL code, modify it and bury it in your own proprietary licenced application well, sorry, no, you can't do that - no more than you could with MPL or GPL licenced code.
Also, there ARE patented concepts in the OpenSolaris code, which you are welcome to use, as long as you use entire files (i.e. covered by the "file-based" license).
Correct, and you may also modify those files, provided the modified files are made available under the terms of the CDDL.
I don't want to put any of my clients or projects at risk, so I can't look at the code.
At risk of what exactly? Your tendencies to want to take other people's code and relicence it? Your email address says '@gnu-designs.com', but I wonder if actually you're a BSD licence fan.
So nope, I haven't even looked at the code, because frankly, I can't, without contaminating my own code and ideas.
Looking at CDDL code is not going to do that.
Note that copyright does not disallow you to look and reimplement. Note further that not looking does not protect you against patent claims.
If you truly were concerned about protecting your clients from patent risks in your own code, then your safest bet would be to take the CDDL code and link to it: with your own code under whatever licence you want, the CDDL code implementing the patent and providing you and your users with a grant to use the patent.
You havn't fallen for the FUD put about by a certain libc hacker have you? (Who just happens to work for a competitor of Sun's? Pure coincidence of course..).
If he looks at BSD internals, anything he comes up with relation to those internals might be considered derivative works and would need to be BSD licensed.
How is this marked insightful? The poster above me is completely wrong. The BSD licence *allows* you to not only derive and licence as you wish, but even take the code, unmodified, and relicence it, as you wish.
Parent has no clue about the current BSD licence.
The arguement is simple and well covered, the company owns the computer, your email, and anything you do on company time
Please be aware that this argument doesn't hold water in the EU.