Peter Howkins wrote:
> I'd hope that if Sun or the other contributors were
> no longer deriving a commercial benifit from it
> being closed, that they wouldn't object to CDE
> being open sourced if they were asked.
Certainly - but if it requires a lot of work digging through
old source code and contracts to determine who owns what and
who has to give permission, Sun isn't likely to volunteer a
large team of engineers & lawyers to do this. (The initial
OpenSolaris ON code base took several dozen engineers and
lawyers most of a year to sift through the 10 million lines
of code released and to evaluate the relevant matching licenses
for each - CDE is a couple million on it's own, and while there
shouldn't be as many different copyright owners involved, there
are still more than just a couple to sort through.)
For big, old, diversely-owned code bases, releasing as open source
isn't cheap or easy.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
