gplv2/cddl dual-licensing

Saturday, Aug 18. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

This should be implied as usual, but I’ll explicitly state it here: this is my personal opinion only, and isn’t reflective of any opinion of the OGB (OpenSolaris Governing Board) nor of Sun.

Looks like the Netbeans project is thinking of going the dual license route, and licensing under both CDDL and GPLv2. Doing a Google search for ‘netbeans cddl gplv2′ pulls up quite a few blogs and responses from people who generally view it as favourable – but it’s not clear to me why.

A few posts cite that it will make Netbeans more “Linux-friendly”. I’m not sure how or why this perception is there. Are people looking to integrate Netbeans into the Linux kernel? Into Emacs? (Wouldn’t be surprised really..) There is nothing in the CDDL that prevents Netbeans from being distributed in Linux distributions, and as near as I can tell there is nothing in the GPLv2 that would prohibit distributions from bundling Netbeans. So is it really just people’s false perception that “anything not GPLv2 is bad”?

My (and many other people’s) worry with projects going down the dual licensing path is the danger of creating a fork…. how will patches and fixes be ported in the source base? What if someone forks a GPLv2 only Netbeans from which fixes can be sent back upstream into the CDDL Netbeans?

Do people (Sun?) think that more people will contribute to Netbeans now that it’s GPLv2? I would argue the contributor agreement requirement is more of a stumbling block than the license. If people are willing and sane enough to sign the SCA, then I would think they would be intelligent enough to understand the licenses under which their code would be distributed.

It just seems to me that people push Sun to hop on the dual-licensing with GPLv2/v3 wagon merely for the sake of publicity. I’ve yet to see compelling reasons to dual-license. Now switching entirely to a GPLv2/GPLv3 license is more compelling to me since it reduces the fork-dangers of having a dual licensed source base. If there is compelling code out there (Eclipse? I’m not sure how the mingling of GPL & EPL (Eclipse Public License, not the English Premier League) goes..) that is GPLv2 and Netbeans wanted to go the GPLv2 route to promote co-mingling and cross-pollination of code – then that’s one thing. That is a compelling technical reason for a license switch in my mind. (Likewise for OpenSolaris if it were to pursue the GPLv3 route).

One Trackback to “gplv2/cddl dual-licensing”

  1. El Geek Errante · El Geek Errante: transmisión #11
    August 30th, 2007 at 15:31

2 Comments to “gplv2/cddl dual-licensing”

  1. Dalibor Topic Says:
    August 19th, 2007 at 14:54

    I think people are more likely to contribute to something they can reuse themselves. As someone who usually uses the GPL for his own work, I’d be more likely to contribute to a dual licensed NetBeans project, than to a CDDL one, as I can’t reuse the code from the latter in my own projects.

  2. Simon Phipps Says:
    August 26th, 2007 at 04:56
    What if someone forks a GPLv2 only Netbeans from which fixes can be sent back upstream into the CDDL Netbeans?

    That’s a risk, but to create a useful fork to which others contribute the rebel would need to either maintain a “masking layer” over the NetBeans code so that it can delta future revisions, which would keep the scope of the fork small, or gather sufficient developers to replicate the original community. The former has happened elsewhere (NeoOffice for example is a masking layer over OpenOffice.org) and the latter is an unlikely event which, if it happens, is an indictment of a failure of the original community that would undoubtedly be manifest in other ways as well.

    It’s easy to get drawn in to the specifics of the terms of licenses, but I’m coming round to agreeing with Eben Moglen that the primary role of licenses in Free software lays not in their specific terms but in their role as the constitution of a community. I believe the addition of GPL to NetBeans is a reflection of a desire to be included in certain GNU/Linux distributions that use that license as their constitution. That was certainly the main motivation for using GPL for the Java platform.

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