From: Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 10:46:32AM -0800: [snip] > Does anyone know what license this release is under, and if it's a FSF > approved license?
If you go to http://opensolaris.org, it tells you.
CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License). It's OSI-approved.
I very much doubt it's FSF-approved, as it doesn't *seem* (from my quick reading) to constrain people from using CDDL-licensed code next to non-CDDL-licensed code. (Plus the FSF seems to strongly dislike Sun, too, as they're Evil Corporate Types and not Pure Academic Types.)
OSI approval is a good thing, OSI seems to be pretty fair on approval/disapproval. THat doesn't mean its GPL compatible though. The FSF keeps a list of what licenses are/are not GPL compatible legaly, as analyzed by their lawyers. Its not a list of licenses they approve/disapprove of (in fact, several that are compatible they give reasons for disliking, and several that aren't they mention having good points that will probably be picked up in GPL v 3.0), but those that you can freely swap code between.
According to the fsf, the CDDL is a free software license (it follows the tenets of free software), but is NOT compatible with the GPL. Which means Linux code cannot go into Solaris without uthor approval of a dual license. Going the other way may be possible, it would depend on the exact wording of the CDDL.
The text from the FSF:
Sun Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)
This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason.
Also unfortunate in the CDDL is its use of the term "intellectual property".
A lot of those Sun goodies depend a lot of the Sun kernel, I suspect, and will not be easy to port. Drivers, on the other hand, are probably easier to port, so OpenSolaris will probably show greater improvement, unless the Linux community resents the introduction of Yet Another Player, and refuses to play nice.
Being able to see how they're implemented will greatly speed up Linux implementation, even if it can't be straight ported.
Gabe
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