> >Legal says "yes", it's possible for someone to create an OpenSolaris
> >fork based solely on GPLv3, then make GPLv3-only changes to it which we
> >wouldn't be able to take back.
>
> That was quick - I'm mightily impressed by your Sun-Lawyer-Fu ;-)
It was presumably quick because it's the only correct answer. As Casper
and others have pointed out, anything less wouldn't be dual licensing.
> However, the answer is rather worrying :-(
Well, yes and no. It means that we in the OpenSolaris community (in which
I include engineers that are employed by Sun) have the ultimate, final say
in this: if (hypothetically) an autocratic decision were to be made
around dual licensing, the community could take OpenSolaris, rip off
the GPLv3, and redistribute it under the CDDL exclusively. Which is not
to advocate this, but to point out that the mere possibility means that
it is in everyone's interest to have consensus before dual licensing; an
autocratic decision on this is effectively impossible. This can be thought
of as an open source variant of the Cold War's Mutually Assured Destruction
-- a Mutually Assured Forking, if you will.
- Bryan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan Cantrill, Solaris Kernel Development. http://blogs.sun.com/bmc
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