In our SunLabs/CTO organizational All-Hands meeting this morning I had the chance this morning to ask Rich Green (Sun's EVP/Software) about what Sun has learned in the last few years about licenses and open source, especially with the recent GPL'ing of Java and this OpenSolaris thread. His response was interesting, to say the least.
What follows is my (probably imperfect) take on his comments. -------- o When Rich asked whether anyone thought that licensing OpenSolaris under a version of the GPL would be a bad thing, I was the only one in the room of ~80 people to raise my hand (if even only tentatively). I'm not sure if this says more about me or my co-workers :-) I also wouldn't read too much into his asking of the question. o The open source licensing arena is not a worthwhile place to try to innovate. It doesn't matter if your new license is technically better, being different is almost always worse than whatever benefits you sought to gain. In particular, being different means you automatically restrict the potential audience for your code. o One of the reasons Sun is open sourcing its software portfolio is to get it used/reused by everyone (duh!). As people use it, however they use it, Sun benefits by the association. Sure, buying a $$million Black Box full of Sun hardware because you really like Sun's Java Logo or Solaris Express B56 would be one of the more valuable associations :-), but there is also value in developers using free downloads of Solaris Express, Schillix and Nexenta. And in MacOS users using DTrace. And in Linux distros using zfs. o As a leader, it is not a bad thing when people follow. In fact, it is really hard to be a leader with no followers. As long as we continue innovating, making OpenSolaris the best in the world, it is OK if Apple, RedHat and others want to emulate and adapt the things we have done. After all, this sort of thing tends to validate and reinforce OpenSolaris' leadership position. o As good as the Java community was, releasing Java under the GPL made it better. Under the SCSL, the vibe in the FOSS community was "Sun just doesn't get it". With GPL, the feedback changed to "Finally, they get it." -------- What does this mean in the context of OpenSolaris and GPLv3? For myself, I don't know yet. Certainly there are potential issues and pitfalls, but the "what ifs" make me pause: What if OpenSolaris under GPLv3 was usable by a community 10x or 100x as large as the one we have today? What if every Linux distro included the core OpenSolaris technologies? What if the FSF endorsed OpenSolaris :-) To me, OpenSolaris is much more than a distro built from the ON consolidation. How much *more* it can be is really what we are debating here. Peace, -John Background: I've known Rich since he and I started at Sun in '89 or so, and have worked with/for him in several positions. He has, at various times, been in charge of Sun's compilers, Project DOpE (Distributed Objects (pretty much) Everywhere), Java, NetBeans, developer tools and Solaris. He is one of the key executives driving Sun to Open Source its portfolio. As Executive VP/Software, he is the person who is directly responsible for funding the majority of OpenSolaris developers. Oh, and he is not currently in my management chain :-) _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org