Stephen Harpster wrote:
Stack against that the issues we will have to endure if we dual
license - the potential for one license to be ripped off and the
source forked *incompatibly* (the incompatibility is the important
bit), the inability to move bug fixes between versions, the confusion
that dual-licensing will bring (just what *is* an "assembly exception"
anyway?).
Very unlikely that a source fork will happen. Let's face it. Most of
the people who know and understand all the intricacies of OpenSolaris
source code work at Sun. Who's going to fork? How will they maintain
that fork? Constantly chase opensolaris.org? And what happens if their
new incompatible changes don't work with the changes they pull from
opensolaris.org? It's not practical and I can't imagine it happening.
You can't say that.
Somebody could do it "just because".
An assembly exception is sort of a way to neuter a license. Suppose I
have two files, gpl.c and harpster.c. gpl.c is dual licensed under CDDL
and GPLv3. harpster.c is licensed under the Harpster license, a
proprietary license that solves world hunger. ;-)
Dual licensing is complex and just makes things more complex than they
already are.
It is the worst possible outcome.
To gain a good stable and willing developer community that wants to
commit to the opensolaris.org code bases (rather than develop on it) we
need a simple easy to understand licensing model.
Dual (or worse Triple licensing) is too complex for the majority of
developers to understand.
We can't ditch CDDL for all the reasons we put it there in the first
place -- and we don't want to alienate the community we have. There are
and doing dual license with something else may well do that - is that a
risk you personally would be willing to take ?
still folks who will want to embed OpenSolaris in appliances and create
proprietary solutions. CDDL allows for that very nicely. GPL does not.
and of those nice interesting things that help do the appliance stuff
only get released under GPLv3 and not CDDL it doesn't help them.
As you said CDDL allows for a mixing of proprietary and open source in
the way that the GPL does not. This was one of the main reasons the
CDDL was created the way it was. It is also one of the things that many
of us point out as being good about the OpenSolaris community, we have a
license that allows that mixing at a file level.
--
Darren J Moffat
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