On 15/11/2007, James Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Shawn Walker writes: > > On 15/11/2007, James Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Shawn Walker writes: > > > > A wide-range of licensing has been embraced, to be sure. However, that > > > > has only applied so far to 3rd party or non-OS pieces so far. > > > > > > How would a separate management application be considered an "OS > > > piece?" > > > > Because it manages OS' instances? > > That doesn't seem right to me. All sorts of things are used to manage > systems with OpenSolaris-based code on them, including commercial > products from companies such as CA, VMWare, and Veritas, as well as > various network management utilities.
I look at a hypervisor manager differently than other software. In addition, I would expect 3rd party code to have different licensing. It's code from Sun that I expect to be CDDL-licensed. For whatever reason, Sun executives seem to have this identity crisis with licensing. Perhaps I'm just biased towards the CDDL and would like to see all things that are from Sun and are used to manage the OS itself (at a low level like a hypervisor) be under a compatible license. > Heck, SX comes free with a copy of webmin, which can be used to manage > an OpenSolaris system, and that's not under CDDL. True, but I look at that as an application; not an OS manager. I consider VMWare or a hypervisor to be an OS manager since they are low level and dig "deeply" into the OS itself in a way. I guess this is just my personal perspective. > > > Aren't other common Sun things used with Solaris and OpenSolaris (such > > > as Java and the SPARC CPUs) available under other licenses? Do they > > > affect anything about OpenSolaris? > > > > Java and SPARC CPUs aren't used to manage OS instances. > > Java is used to manage all sorts of OS features, including the DHCP > server integrated in OpenSolaris. It's also used as the installer for > SX. I don't think that argument holds up. See above. > > 1) The article is not clear about what will be licensed with what; and > > as usual shoddy journalism is at its finest with the continued > > implications that OpenSolaris will be GPLv3. > > I wasn't able to read it that way, but if you were, I still don't see > the point in posting the resulting complaint here, especially given > the history with GPLv3 wars on this list. > > So, I have to ask again: in commenting on a bit of journalism that > appears to be unrelated to OpenSolaris itself, exactly what are you > expecting to accomplish here? To me it is related. But I suppose that's just my perspective. > > 2) That something used to manage instances of a CDDL-based operating > > system will be licensed under a more restrictive license. > > I fail to see the point. Is CDDL-based software less useful because > there's a compatible management application out there that's not using > CDDL? > > I don't see how that could be true. How is OpenSolaris affected? That's what remains to be seen I suppose. Hence the question. I never implied it would be good or bad one way or another, but I do know that having a different license is going to place certain restrictions that would not otherwise be there. For example, if I wanted to take the source code of the hypervisor manager and add bits and pieces of OpenSolaris code to it; I could not. Even though it comes from Sun and is OS-related in my view. Perhaps this inconsistency in license choices for code that I view as uniquely OS-related (unlike webmin, etc.) is what is difficult for me to comprehend. The licensing choice does make sense from the perspective of working with GNU/Linux, etc. vendors. I'm just trying to discuss what I view as OpenSolaris-related and to find out if anyone else knows anything more about this. The website that was opened today is woefully short on substance at the moment. Not only that, if you go to the link openvxm project page at dev.java.net, it claims the license is GPLv2: https://openxvm.dev.java.net/ It is things like these that make my head spin a bit. Thanks for your response, -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor..." --Larry Wall _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
