On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 10:16:08AM -0700, Rich Teer wrote: > > But getting back to the main point: I don't think we're ever going > to agree on SW licensing philosophy, but I don't think there's any > way that OpenSolaris can be icensed under the GPL. The need and/or > desire to link with 3rd party code that may or may not be open source > prevents it. >
I agree, but it's worth noting that there are two legitimate yet conflicting points of view in this conversation: If your goal is to benefit the "Free Software" movement as defined by the GNU organization, then it is true that the CDDL does not benefit this movement. The GPL is intentionally backed by a political philosophy which opposes the existence of proprietary software. If, as Richard asserts, the CDDL contains incompatible philosophical views, then allowing one to link the CDDL would violate the philosophy behind the GPL. If your goal is to benefit the "Open Source" movement (which, as Richard asserts, is different from the above), then the CDDL is better than the GPL because it allows cross-polination with a larger variety of licenses, including proprietary software. The choice of license in this case is a combination of philosophy and technical requirements. The use of CDDL for OpenSolaris (and an increasing number of projects at Sun) is a clear indication of where our philosphy sits, as well as the fundamental requirements of OpenSolaris (the ability to link with proprietary code). It's best to just accept that both sides have a right to their opinion, and that both sides have legitimate reasons (besides "Sun hates Linux" or "viral licenses are evil") for their beliefs. - Eric -- Eric Schrock, Solaris Kernel Development http://blogs.sun.com/eschrock _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
