Sun Considering GPL For OpenSolaris 215
narramissic writes, "At an event today to formally open-source Java, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and CEO, and Rich Green, the company's senior VP of software had an exchange in which Schwartz put Green on the spot about using GPL for OpenSolaris: 'Are you averse to changing the license, Rich Green?' Schwartz asked. 'Certainly not,' Green responded, prompting the Sun CEO to fire back in a half-joking manner: 'Will you GPL Solaris, Mr. Green?' 'We will take a close look at it,' Green said, adding that it was possible that the familiarity and comfort level many developers have with the GPL may result in Sun adopting it for OpenSolaris." Another note about Sun's decision to use the GPL for Java comes from reader squiggleslash, who writes: "According to Jonathan Schwartz, the decision of Novell and Microsoft to '(suggest) that free and open source software wasn't safe unless a royalty was being paid' is what prompted Sun to finally come down on using the GPL for Java. So I guess every cloud has a silver lining."
Money Pressure (Score:4, Interesting)
Novell and Microsoft do not.
That would be awesome! (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, there'd be a problem with that whole "gnu's NOT unix" thing...
Excellent (Score:5, Interesting)
This could be a bigger boon than a lot of people realize. The licensing differences between Solaris and Linux are one of several factors slowing them from adopting ideas and code from one another. OpenSolaris users could benefit from ease of importing more cutting edge features from Linux. Linux could benefit by having access to some of the cleaner implementation ideas from Solaris. I've felt for some time that much of what holds linux back is the unwillingness to adopt newer and better features out of a fear that a given distribution will be less compatible with others and because Linux is trying to wear many hats. Too many decisions are made to benefit its use as a server or make it easier to use on a portable, while leaving it behind others for a workstation.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Great, but will it change anything? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yeah sure... (Score:4, Interesting)
There's been talk of open sourcing it by Christmas, and reports that it might be under the GPL (and reports that it might be under a different license.)
That does not prove, however, that the Novell/MS deal didn't prompt the final decision for Sun. Certainly, they'd already done the analysis and had a pretty good idea of the pluses and minuses of the various options. But certainly the Novell/MS deal remixed those slightly, and might have tipped things in the GPL.
Re:That would be awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)
I think Sun made a very clever choice with the CDDL for Solaris. It's Free, and the Linux guys can't just take the best bits and surpass them. At the moment, some of the BSD guys are doing so (taking ZFS and DTrace, for example), but Solaris has gained a lot from *BSD over the years.
As someone who uses a variety of *NIX platforms, none of which is Linux, I don't really see what Sun would gain from using the GPL, and I can see what they would lose.
Re:That would be awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)
Device drivers
Re:Money Pressure (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, the Zune has not yet made a dime for MS, and I've seen rumors that it is also being sold at a loss.
In addition, Novell has not sold hardware for a long time. In fact, they haven't done it since they became a profitable software company.
Re:Great, but will it change anything? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, quite a number of folks who are my consulting customers use Darwin (really BSD) sources as the "reference copies" of programs they're adapting for their own use.
This is in part because of the good quality of the code, and the company which stands behind it. In part it is because of the larger BSD community who stands semi-invisibly behind Apple... some customers really understand the strength of community. And finally, for the license-paranoid, in part this is because of the use of the very old and weak BSD license.... some customers really don't understand the community (;-))
Coming back to the main point of the discussion, adoption of the GPL by well-known fortune-500 companies is a step away from the world of Microsoft, SCO and FUD.
Definitely a change, and definitely for the better.
--dave
Re:Excellent (Score:1, Interesting)
This is not a minor issue. The big headache with any GNU/Linux distribution is the complicated and often intractable support matrices - a result of the fluid nature of the kernel API.
Big headache for closed drivers. Tough shit on them. The Free ones get fixed when the API changes. The kernel developers have the right idea: you have our source... why should we help you hide your kernel source and in the process hamper our own development.
Re:GPL DTrace for teh win! (Score:4, Interesting)
When you can get an open-sourced carrier-grade OS like (Open)Solaris at no cost,
why still Linux?
OpenSolaris surely currently lacks a lot of (x86) hardware support, no drivers
for widespread hardware, etc. - but as more and more users actively use and
support OpenSolaris, more and more vendors will provide those.
What I don't like about Linux - Linux (and a lot of Linux software), that is - is
the neverending story of changing APIs - use something, update something else - Oops.
I have a Linux system here, with at least three different versions of, e.g., BerkeleyDB.
1.85 compat, 3.something, 4.idontknow. API changes, incompatibilities, you name it.
Ever tried to compile popular Linux software on another Un*x? Whenever I encounter some
piece of GPL-licensed software, I can almost guarantee it won't compile on Solaris, Tru64,
You want DTrace? Zones? Use Solaris. Is there any technical reason (no politics, please) where
using Linux actually offers any benefit?
(Yes, "smc" and all those java-based admin utilities suck. But commandline-based alternatives
do exist.)
This is not a flamebait. Serious answers will be appreciated.
Re:Excellent (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Excellent (Score:0, Interesting)
Tracing and a transactioned file system? Those are about 30 years old and Linux has multiple implementations of both. Why would it need another one?
What would Solaris get?
Lots of hardware drivers and much better compatibility with different file systems and other standards. That's far more important than yet another tracing facility and yet another file system.
I'm not complaining if Sun open sources "Open" Solaris, but don't expect it to make much of a difference to anybody. IBM open sourced many of their "enterprise features" and donated them to Linux, and most of them were received with a yawn.
Re:That would be awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)
Just google "linus" and "solaris" and see how dismissive he is of it, calling it "a joke", just like he's been dismissive of the BSDs.
Which probably explains why it's taken Linux so long to start resembling the Solaris kernel in terms of architecture. Linux was a poor second to the BSD's in the early to mid 1990's because it was largely written by hobbyists who didn't have the resources or knowledge that had been fed into Unix over 20 odd years. Until 2.6, Linux was a poor second to Solaris because of Linus's unwillingness to listen to people who had looked beyond the confines of the Linux kernel. People who had looked at the design of Solaris were forever making comments to the effect that Solaris had done x and acheived y, while Linus was floundering about looking for answers to things like sophisticated SMP support, threading and a decent scheduler. The Solaris kernel is still way more sophisticated than Linux, it's just the userland that needs an overhaul - and no, that doesn't mean importing gobs of poorly or inaccurately documented GNU tools ...
Re:Sun may have taken MS $$$ to not GPL Solaris (Score:3, Interesting)
I put the "wild" preface there for a reason. The FSF is a great organization, but sometimes they are a bit nutty. Eben has some heavy insight into things from a legal and IBM perspective, and is tied directly to important figures in these matters. He likely heard a rumor or two and pieced it together as something far larger than it was. I have no sources other than what I heard at that meeting.
The FSF has been listing a Free version of Java as a top priority for the past few years, stating that it is the largest hole in the Free Software community. See http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html [fsf.org]. The FSF shouldn't announce the GPL'ing of Java, but it should respond to the announcements by commending Sun, removing GCC/Java from it's priorities list, and/or getting Stallman to amend his Java rant.My bad, I got it backwards (which is odd, since I'm a Solaris admin). That was added as an afterthought.