C. Bergstr?m wrote:
> With all due respect.. I think the OSI is more qualified than the OGB to
> determine which license(s) are suitable for an open source project.
For an open source project, yes. For OpenSolaris, I don't necessarily agree.
If you read my proposed policy, it basically just extended the acceptable
licenses from "approved by OSI" to "approved by OSI, or is the OpenSolaris
Binary License, or, for docs/etc, is a similar type Creative Commons license",
with the flexibility for the OGB to adjust without needing a constitutional
amendment.
> The real goal here is to build a fully open source distro based on
> OpenSolaris technology.
That is *your* goal, but I can't say for certain that is the goal of
everyone involved in the OpenSolaris community. For instance, while
I wish they'd open source it, I'm not going to say the nvidia driver
should be blocked and nvidia users not able to use 3D acceleration
because their driver sources are closed. This is not a new idea -
Ubuntu has taken a similar approach, while other projects like
Debian & OpenBSD are more rigorously opposed to "binary blobs" - like
the Linux & BSD communities, I think our community can have different
distros with different policies on openness and not try to enforce a
one-size-fits-all mandate from the OGB level across all of them. (After
all, why would different distros exist if we forced them all to be
exactly the same?)
What the "real goal" of the entire project/community is would be a better
thing to work out for the mission statement/charter discussion though.
> As a compromise any "Open"Solaris technology distro which
> isn't packaged and building under an entirely OSI approved license must
> not use "Open" in the name.
As we were all reminded two years ago, Sun alone owns the OpenSolaris
trademark and decides on appropriate usage, the community does not and
cannot dictate terms on that usage to the trademark owner. I cannot
see Sun management changing their distro name to uphold a pure open source
ideology, when the OpenSolaris project, even before Indiana, has always
taken a more pragmatic approach to allow closed source when necessary
(such as the selection of CDDL to allow linking with closed sources,
instead of the all-must-be-open requirement of the GPL).
> The other "problem" here is that the
> OpenSolaris Community really isn't producing OpenSolaris. The fact is
> that Sun is very generously providing OpenSolaris.
This is unfortunately true, but not something any constitutional rewording
or OGB policy can change, rather is something that needs to be worked out
with the engineering and management groups involved.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
