The OpenSolaris Board Just Killed Itself, As Expected

[nanonyme]

Note that I attempted to remain as objective as possible. The former doesn't mean you should use GPL, it's just important to keep in mind when deciding whether or not you want to use it.
There's some ethical aspects involved there too since it's not algother hard to recognize similar strategies in patent pools by MPEG LA and such and GPL licensed software for GPL community.
The thing is whether one believes the cause is important enough to justify the cause when it comes to ideology. Is it okay to gather big enough an arsenal of IP that GPL community can force other people to join in the GPL community if it furthens the cause of opensource code? What if it's another opensource project that's just using GPL-incompatible license?

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster

Friedrich Nietzsche

[Tomservo]

How the fuck would the GPL have made a difference? Practically all code in OpenSolaris belongs to Oracle. If they chose not to release any source code, they'll simply do so. GPL or CDDL. And if anyone tried funny suing business, they'd just change the license and make you fuck off.

[Apopas]

As long as they had chosen GPL then the code wouldn't belong to Oracle anymore but to the community.

[nanonyme]

As long as they had chosen GPL then the code wouldn't belong to Oracle anymore but to the community.

Myeah, true. Oracle wouldn't have been allowed to make derivative work on their own GPL code unless they also published that under GPL.

[monraaf]

Myeah, true. Oracle wouldn't have been allowed to make derivative work on their own GPL code unless they also published that under GPL.

Huh? You can make a derivative work of your own code and distribute that under whatever license you desire, regardless of any previous license you used in the past to distribute your code.

The keyword here is own code (i.e. code of which you are the copyright holder). In case of GPL'd code, you just have to make sure that you require contributers to assign the copyright to you or have some other clause in a contributer agreement that gives you the right to relicense their contributed code. Not exactly something new to Sun.

[jadrevenge]

Huh? You can make a derivative work of your own code and distribute that under whatever license you desire, regardless of any previous license you used in the past to distribute your code.

Completely true ... and the reason that OpenSolaris was produced under CDDL ... It wasn't to stop Sun working with their own code, it was to try to minimise forking and general chaos to their main code branch.

If you produce GPL code and embed it in Solaris then Sun^H^H^HOracle have no control over that bit and no say on how that code can be used in future ...

A good example of what they were trying to do in controlling how Solaris developed can be seen with VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Contributor_information), which is released under the GPL, but if you make any changes they need to be released in either the CDDL (by signing a "Sun Contributor Agreement" form and handing the code to developers, basically giving up your rights to the code) or released to them under a BSD style license so that they can copy it and re-release it

what was this topic abaout again, I'm lost and rambling