Alan Burlison wrote:
When the
projects (both existing and yet-to-be-born) to remove all the closed
binaries and non-GPLv3 code are complete, is there anything to stop
someone at that point ripping out both the assembly exception and the
CDDL licensed and producing an incompatibly-licensed fork, with all the
problems that entails?
IANAL as well. And I don't speak for Sun.
So, if I follow this hypothetical scenerio for a moment, how does it play out?
The Emancipation project finally does its last putback into
OpenSolaris/ON Build "x", replacing the last of the closed
binary code.
Some enterprising team immediately forks and strips off the
CDDL license, making a pure GPLv3 version of OpenSolaris/ON.
2 weeks later, OpenSolaris/ON Build x+1 comes out
(or the Hg repository gate is updated or ...)
and the fork is a little bit out of date.
...repeat every 2 weeks...
and each time the fork gets more out of date.
Unless everyone stopped contributing to the OpenSolaris project and
rehosted themselves over to the fork, the fork maintainers will be
forced to either ignore the OpenSolaris changes, or spend more and
more time resyncing their fork - neither of which is long-term
feasible. Sure, some would use this fork, and would be happy.
Good for them. Sure, this splits the community a bit, but not
fatally for OpenSolaris.
On the other hand, if everyone moved lock, stock and barrel over to
the fork, there still shouldn't be much of an issue - after all,
the Nextenta's, Schillix's and Belinix's etc of the world shouldn't
have a problem with using the GPL'd versions then, either.
Yes, some users who themselves ca not use GPL'd stuff might be
disenfranchised, so they wouldn't like this option. The key
uncertainty here is whether it would effect Sun. I'm not sure
(but IANAL) it would.
On the third hand, since it is really only this transitional state,
where we have that bag of closed binaries slung over our back, that
makes the CDDL important and the GPL impossible, maybe the OpenSolaris
community itself would be the ones to do the fork....
I don't see the downside here...
-John
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