Darren J Moffat wrote:
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".
Of course. But it's not practical and thus very unlikely. I'm doing
risk analysis here. There's also a chance that the sun may go supernova
tomorrow, but the probability of that is very, very small. Not
everything is weighted equally.
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.
I think it's a challenge, but I think it could be overcome.
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 ?
Maybe a portion of our community. That's why we're having this
discussion.
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.
Which is why contributions back into OpenSolaris (the kernel anyway),
will need to be dual-licensed.
--
Stephen Harpster
Director, Open Source Software
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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