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> the GPL brigade is getting louder in their intolerance of other licences. I really don't see much evidence of this, certainly not from the FSF/SFC, who speci
by chimeracoder 11y ago
> the GPL brigade is getting louder in their intolerance of other licences.
I really don't see much evidence of this, certainly not from the FSF/SFC, who specifically do not discourage use of free licenses that are GPL-compatible, such as the BSD and MIT licenses[0]. The anti-GPL crowd is much more vocal about their distaste for the GPL, especially on forums like HN.
The issue at hand is the use of a license which is not compatible with the GPL. No matter which way you slice it, that's a massive inconvenience to everyone, and pretty much nobody wins as a result.
(As for relicensing, it is literally impossible to change the license of Linux at this point, because the rights are held by thousands of contributors individually (some of whom are dead, and tracking copyright as it passes across estates is a notoriously difficult task[1]). If there's ever going to be a reconciliation between ZFS and Linux, it would require Oracle to relicense ZFS under any one of the many GPL-compatible licenses.)
[0] They do, incidentally, discourage the use of the terms "BSD license" and "MIT license", arguing that those are ambiguous and should be deprecated in favor of "3-clause BSD license" and "X11 license", respectively. But that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, which is about the use of the actual licenses themselves and the terms they represent, not the names that people use to call them.
[1] Even figuring out if a given book can be reprinted is prohibitively difficult for publishers, and that's with works that only have one single author.
- Sleaker 11y agoI think you got it backwards, the massive inconvenience for everyone is that Linux is using the GPL and people don't want to have to deal with all the re-licensing compatibility bullshit just to be able to distribute a binary of some other FOSS. seriously, CDDL is FSF/OSI approved. Sure, Oracle could resolve it by switching to a GPL compatible license, but the problem is not oracle's clearly free software. The problem is GPL forcibly does not allow perfectly fine open source licensed software to be distributed in binary form due to it's copyleft.
- davexunit 11y agoThe GPL is not to blame here, it's doing its job.
- chimeracoder 11y ago> seriously, CDDL is FSF/OSI approved. ...as is the GPL, which is also written by the FSF. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make by saying this. Many FSF/OSI-approved licenses are not pairwise-compatible with each other. It's not limited to either the GPL or the CDDL. > but the problem is not oracle's clearly free software. The problem is as much Oracle as it is Linux. Especially since, as noted in other comments, the CDDL was created specifically to be incompatible with Linux's license. > The problem is GPL forcibly does not allow perfectly fine open source licensed software to be distributed in binary form due to it's copyleft. This isn't an accurate description either of the GPL or of the incompatibility at play here.
- mh8h 11y agoI agree, many of the open source licenses are not pairwise-compatible. But the fact that GPL is a strong copyleft license makes collaboration more difficult. And the idea that CDDL was made specifically to be incompatible with GPL is at best a speculation. See Bryan Cantrill's video about the history of Solaris [0] and about different licenses [1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm8P4oCIY3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm8P4oCIY3g
- chimeracoder 11y ago> But the fact that GPL is a strong copyleft license makes collaboration more difficult. The problem is that both the GPL and the CDDL prevent further restrictions to the license. This actually has very little to do with the copyleft; plenty of other licenses (including the CDDL) prevent further restrictions on redistribution, even without imposing a copyleft.
- geofft 11y agoGPL is "clearly free software" too, and FSF/OSI approved too. The problem is that the GPL and the CDDL both have no-further-restrictions clauses, as mentioned in the article: > 6. …You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. > 3.4 … You may not offer or impose any terms on any Covered Software in Source Code form that alters or restricts the applicable version of this License The situation would be exactly the same if, say, Linux were under the CDDL and ZFS were under the 4-clause BSD license, or the OpenSSL license, or Creative Commons, or the MPL 1.0, or whatever. The GPL and the CDDL both have exactly the same "problem" here.
- mioelnir 11y agoIf both licenses only had no-further-restrictions clauses, they would be perfectly fine. The issue is the imposing of further restrictions, which only the GPL has in this case. And if no-further-restrictions clauses are evil and have to go, well, then the GPL's no-further-restriction clause has to go as well.
- Dylan16807 11y agoWhen two licenses do similar things and are incompatible, it's the project that chose the rare license that deserves the blame for inconvenience.