[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The big bonus is that GPLv3 will open us up to a whole new audience.
Linux aside, there are plenty of other big projects that will combine
with OpenSolaris more easily if we're dual licensed. To be successful,
you want to reach out to as many communities as possible. The more
friends the better. GPLv3 will give us that.
Assertion without proof.
Likewise your argument as well, but actual data is nearly impossible to
obtain until after the fact, so let's continue with our current working
theory.
Who would this bring to our community?
The entire GNU community for one.
There are some indication that it would scare off others too.
True.
And, perhaps, can we in fairness in this discussion say that we're
using "GPLv3 with the assembly exception"; that makes GPLv3 much
more like the CDDL; and I'm sure that the community isn't stupid.
If they like that property of the GPL, then they won't stand for
the exception.
Code under GPLv2 cannot be brought in; code under GPLv3 cannot
be brought in. The only thing that can happen is that code under
the GPLv3 w/ assembly exception can be taken to a GPLv3 environment
(without exceptions) and such changes can subsequently not be taken
back and help improve OpenSolaris.
How does this benefit OpenSolaris?
We already bring in GPLv2 code. So we must therefore limit this
discussion to the kernel where I expect contributions to remain
relatively low away.
Similarly, if they *dislike* the CDDL so much, they won't
contribute under the CDDL and so their contributions will be
useless for the whole of OpenSolaris.
Regardless of whether this license brings in more people or scares
people away, the best thing to grow the community is focusing on
the tasks at hand:
- get the consitution ratified
- get the OGB elected
- get the mechanisms up and running so the barrier to commit
is lowered.
Yes! So what's holding you up? ;-)
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.
That doesn't mean that the risk does not exist; and the fork may take
different forms: forks of parts of the source code. There's no need
to fork all of the source code for OpenSolaris to be hurt.
Welcome to the world of open development. People will take our code.
That's good. In fact, it's happening already. Apple's XCode
(http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/xcode.html) is a kick-ass front-end
for their version of DTrace. I don't see them contributing that back to
OpenSolaris.....
--
Stephen Harpster
Director, Open Source Software
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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