Just say no….

Thursday, Feb 1. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

…. to license flamewars.

There’s been a good flamefest^Wdebate going on over at opensolaris-discuss about GPLv3. I’ve gone into “mark-all-msgs-as-read” mode, but here are my brief summarised thoughts and opinions on the matter:

  1. I’ve yet to hear a legal or technical incentive for dual-licensing with GPLv3. Indeed, if I understand it right, someone can fork the ON codebase and license it solely under GPLv3 which would prohibit changes flowing back upstream or being incorporated into CDDL codebases.

  2. Dual and triple licensing has just caused messes in other OSS projects I’ve seen. Didn’t we just retire the SISSL becaused nobody used it in OpenOffice?

  3. What’s wrong with CDDL?

I guess you can see I’m somewhat opposed to dual-licensing the codebase with GPLv3. I just don’t see what it buys us. My initial instinct is to just say no… but I suppose to be fair, I’ll wait to see how it plays out with the license being finalised and all that.

I think at the very least…. I will just say no to getting further involved in that thread of doom.

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4 Comments to “Just say no….”

  1. Joe Says:
    February 1st, 2007 at 13:19

    “3. What’s wrong with CDDL?”

    That kind of question that people have yet to answer. I could not find anything wrong with CDDL other than being more open than GPL.

  2. Mads Says:
    February 1st, 2007 at 14:04

    Thanks for summarizing so nicely. I couldn’t agree more. The only argument I’ve heard is that it will draw extra people in from the linux side, but I don’t think it will work

  3. John Says:
    February 1st, 2007 at 14:49

    for full disclosure purposes I support gpl but not dual licenses, but I refuse to say why for fear of dragging the thread from os.o to your blog

    Now that that’s out of the way… As much as a flamefest as the thread was/is, It wasn’t completely fruitless. A lot of frustrations about the process & community involvement (or lack thereof) got out in the open. The closed_bins issue, the commit process, etc

  4. Wes W Says:
    February 1st, 2007 at 15:03

    Again, well put Steve.

    However, the “flamefest” did seem to bring forward many that are completely content with the current license structure; granted these are likely people already involved in the project.

    Hopefully those threads at least highlight that something such as a license change is not trivial and that we shouldn’t put the horse before the cart.

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