Rich Teer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Aug 2005, Richard M. Stallman wrote:
>
> > Yet, I seem to have missed the forest for the trees I'm inhabiting.
> > Indeed, the
> > cross pollination at the operating system level makes an even stronger
> > case for
> > compatibility between the GPL and CDDL licenses.
> >
> > I agree. Solaris as free software will be much more useful if they
> > switch to the GPL, or at least some GPL-compatible license.
>
> Why can't the GPL be re-written to be CDDL compatible? After all, from
> my view point, it is the GPL that prevents the mixing of GPL and CDDL
> code, not vice-versa. As a developer, using GPLed code certainly restricts
> my freedom (so I avoid it).
OK, now that this discussion have been carried into this list, it may be better
not to hide my ideas (I tried a personal mail exchange before....)
/*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*/
"Richard M. Stallman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 1. Instead of rampantly speculating about what the FSF website means
> when it
> says the CDDL and GPL are incompatible, has anybody tried asking the FSF?
>
> We say two licenses are "incompatible" when combining code released
> under those two licenses into a single program is legally impossible
> because any way of licensing the combination would violate at least
> one of the licenses.
It would be interesting to know why.....see below.
> 2. Many of us consider GPL/CDDL compatibility a prerequisite for the Open
> Solaris project to flourish.
>
> The current license of Solaris is a free software license, which means
> it is basically ethical. But it would be a more useful contribution
> to the free software commnuity if it had a GPL-compatible license, and
> I wish Sun would make that change.
It would be really nice if it was possible for a OSS developer to use code
from any of the OSI aproved licenses.
BTW: this is what most people believe is already possible when first
reading OSS related information. The strength of free software will finally
appear after it is possible to combine code from various sources.
Now let us discuss the reason of incompatibilities from my point of view....
With respect to combining code under CDDL & GPL, I see two problems (depending
on which code to include into which bigger project) that need discussion.
Let me start with this one:
While there are a lot of OSS licenses aproved by the OSI that _all_ meet
the basic requirements, few of them may be combined.
>From my understanding, code under the CDDL may be combined with many
other OSI licenses but code being under the GPL cannot be combined with
any of the other licenses (to make an example with one of the very
popular licenses, you cannot include GPLd code into a BSDl project
because this would entirely remove the kind of freedom that is important
to BSDl developers).
My understanding is that the problem that causes the incompatibilities
with GPLd code is the fact that the GPL requires the whole work to
be put under the GPL. As this requires to change the license under wich
other code is to be distributed, this is the major cause of incompatibilities.
The solution I see is:
If e.g. the GPL would not require the whole project to be put under
the GPL but just require that the whole project is not allowed to use
any code that is not under a OSI compliant license, the primary
intention of the GPL (*) would not be given up but the GPL would become
compatible to many other OSI aproved licenses.
*) I understand that the primary intention of the GPL is that whole projects
stay OSS on whole and that modifications need to be made available.
If this major cause of problems in the GPL would be removed, I see no remaining
other reason why CDDLd code could not be used in a GPLd project. From my
understanding, including CDDL code into a GPL based project would not
cause any problem (in case the mofification mentioned above will be aplied to
the GPL), because the CDDL also requires changes to be published.
Let furthon me use the term GPL-3 for a GPL based license that has been
modified as mentioned above.
The second general problem I am aware of is the fact that the discussuions
on linking, dynamic loading, etc. have never been finally answered.
It seems that the answer mainly depends on what you call a "derived work".
My understanding is that linking against system libraries or loading
dynamic objects (e.g. via dlopen()) does not create a derived work.
If this is true, GPL-3d code could be used together with all user space
applications from OpenSolaris. Doing this would howver limit the "freedom"
of the whole application from the BSD view, as then no closed source code
could be added anymore later.
For kernel modules, things are harder to discuss.
If you don't call the whole code that runs in the "kernel context" to be
a "derived work" of e.g. a filesystem, it would be possible to use a
filesystem licensed under GPL together with OpenSolaris.
Let me call the OpenSolaris kernel a set of the three programs
/platform/*/kernel/unix, /kernel/misc/krltd & /kernel/genunix that
loads other programs (like ufs) into the same address space. Note that
there is a major difference to Linux: krltd prevents "programs" like "ufs"
from being able to see symbold from other kernel space "programs".
>From my understanding of linking, the filesystem acts as a "whole work"
and is compiled and linked into one or more binaries. When the filesystem
binary is loaded into the kernel later, no new "derived work" is created
just by the load process. This seems to be the common sense even with the
Linux kernel as otherwise loading CS drivers into Linux would be illegal.
Conclusion:
If the small modification (as mentioned above0) is applied to the GPL, it
could be made compatible with many other OSI aproved licenses including the
CDDL. If in addition the creation of a "derived work" is better discussed and
if it did follow the rules I did mention above, GPLd code could even be used
inside the Solaris Kernel.
I understand that it was important to define the GPL-2 as is in the
world as it has been nearly 15 years ago, but I am in hope that the future
of OSS is a movement towards unique basic rules and towards compatibility
of licenses. It would e.g. be great if the OSI would define a set of first
class licenses that may be combined when creating a "derived work" and
if the OSI would not aprove new licenses that cannot be called a first
class license.
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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