Stephen Harpster wrote:
Ugh. Here's the de-HTML'ed one.... Sorry.....
In the last few months I've seen more and more speculation about the
prospect of dual-licensing OpenSolaris under GPLv3. In November
Jonathan very publically asked Rich if he would look into it, and
everyone knows that we are fully engaged in the GPLv3 process. As Rich
has made clear, we're looking into it. No decisions have been made.
We've seen discussions in blogs and in the news, but I haven't seen much
in the OpenSolaris community itself.
I think that we ("we" being all of you) should be asking ourselves what
we think about GPLv3. What would it
mean to the community if we dual-licensed? It's now a possibility that
we could attach an "assembly exception"
to the GPLv3 which would let us mix GPL and CDDL code. This could open
up a world of possibilities.
But what are the downsides? What does the community, you, think of the
way GPLv3 is taking shape? These are important issues and I urge
everyone with an opinion to voice it sooner rather than later.
The biggest upside here doesn't appear to be an upside for us at all, but
for Sun. A move such as this would generate a lot of good press for you,
I'm sure, but it doesn't do much for us, and as such is just marketing crud.
What would this bring to us as benefit?
"a world of possibilities"... like what?
It would, possibly, ease the integration of GPLv3 licensed software, of
which currently none exists, and several large bodies of GPLv2 software
appear to have stated their lack of desire to move to the new license (or a
new license in general).
So as things stand, we're discussing using a license that doesn't exist, to
open up a "word of possibilities" that as best as I can tell also don't yet
exist.
Discussion of the possible downsides is common in other parts of these
threads, but I'm not sure either pro or con can be clear until we actually
see what the license ends up being, and can thus give *far* more accurate
thought to what this would bring us, as compared to what it would take away.
-- Rich
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