On Jun 14, 2005, at 6:12 PM, Tim Newsham wrote:
The CDDL is yet another reason why the OSI (started by Perens,
Raymond and others to "re-brand" Free Software) was a really
bad (and dangerous) idea.
I complained to Larry Rosen (who approved CDDL as an OSI-compliant
license) and others about this back at TPOSSCON.
I'm concerned about "Free as in speech". Its not clear that the
CDDL permits software Freedom.
*shrug* They come in all flavors. I don't mean to start a licensing
war, but all licenses have some restrictions or other (and hence
not strictly "free"). The only truely free IP is in the public
domain.
sadly, not even "public domain" can establish free IP since it can
still run afoul of patent encumbrances, etc.
I used to claim that the only "free IP" was that which was still in
your head, not reduced to practice, but then the courts
in Texas blew that one out of the water for me.
I'm tempted to emote on the very term "intellectual property", but
the lawyers have had their day, and the courts support the concept,
so I won't here, but try me next time we're splitting pizza and beer.
I have my favorite and licenses I care less about. I'm glad to see
sun grant access to their sources, no matter how you want to
categorize their license. Would I want to use it in a product?
Probably not, but it will be useful the next time I need to know
EXACTLY how something works.
Sure, its useful for some purposes, and Sun has an interesting body
of code. You may not know this, but many of us
attempted to push Sun's management into this move (or something even
stronger) back in the early 1990s.
If you want to see how something works, even Microsoft's "shared
source" will allow you to do so, and yes, Open Solaris
is much more available (and therefore "open") than Microsoft's
respones (shared source).
Alll in all, what Sun is doing is good, but it could be (and needs to
be) better.
jim
