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Is open-sourcing a codebase for an abandoned product somehow expensive or complicated? Are there legal or accounting issues? If not, it seems like buying a bit

Is open-sourcing a codebase for an abandoned product somehow expensive or complicated? Are there legal or accounting issues? If not, it seems like buying a bit of good-will for the price of a bit of paperwork would be a useful investment.

Someone 9y ago
Legal concerns: do we really own this code? If there is code in there that turns out to be copy-pasted from somewhere else, open sourcing makes it more likely that people will find it. That could be expensive (e.g. when some BigCo owns the copyright on code they have been selling for decades) and/or have even more serious consequences (e.g. when there's a GPL-licensed code fragment in there, and they linked it with a part they want to keep commercial) Answering that question conclusively can be very expensive. They may not have a full history of the code, and if they have, it may not contain all metadata needed.k
- justincormack 9y ago
  But it was already open sourced once before, so much of that work was done already.
  - Someone 9y ago
    Valid point, so here is a similar, but different reason: patents. They may fear releasing the source opens them for patent lawsuits or may have patents they aren't willing to give up, and fear that open sourcing it without any patent clause will not give them much goodwill.
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  That's the problem James Gosling encountered trying to convince Sun to release the NeWS source code for free. Parts of it like the font rendering code were owned by AT&T and other companies.
hu88 9y ago
I was at Intel once upon a time when they open sourced some telecom stuff they wanted to get out off. The issues were crazy because of the size of the code base that had accumulated from multiple acquisitions spanning many different divisions in different countries over many years. We couldn't even find people who could tell us what large chunks of the code did or whether they contained anything under patent, trademark etc. It's can be quite expensive and the only reason we did it was there were customers who were willing to pay for the effort.
- mjevans 9y ago
  How was that not already a liability?
  - ci5er 9y ago
    From (my) GP: > some telecom stuff they wanted to get out off. I'm guessing that it might well have been?
- johannes1234321 9y ago
  Sun did that a few years back, Oracle only has to reevaluate what was added since they acquired Sun ...
  - tw04 9y ago
    It's entirely possible everything added since it was acquired by Sun is STILL under an open source license. Just because they haven't released the code or provided it to end-users under that license says nothing about how it's structured internally.
- exikyut 9y ago
  Out of curiosity, what was the (presumably now open-sourced and discussable) "telecom stuff"?
  - lawl 9y ago
    My guess would be oFono: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFono https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFono
akuri 9y ago
All we need is the trademark for Solaris, so that illumos can use its historical name. This should be much easier.
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  While they're at it, Oracle should free the Sun logo too! I imagine they have the poor thing locked up in a vault somewhere.
shagie 9y ago
Sanitization. Remove all things that shouldn't be there. I recall the cleaning of the code - things where developers got a bit... salty - for the Mozilla open source project. Stuff that people really didn't want others to see. Copyright. That intern who worked at SGI or NetApp who (un)knowingly reused some of a project they had on their laptop at their new place of employment that was actually software owned by their old place of employment. Scrubbing that or getting proper (open source) licensing for that bit, along with all the legal headaches that entails. Remember that we're talking about code that has been around since effectively 1982 with Sun UNIX 0.7 (or SunOS 4 as Solaris 1.x in 1991). Licensed from other. I recall that various parts of non-Sun operating systems had licensing for parts of NFS. It wouldn't be surprising to find that parts of Solaris had licensing from other companies too. Including code directly licensed likely wouldn't be compatible with the license from the other company. Removing the licensed code to make it linkable is an option, but a time consuming one that diminishes the value of the overall project ("what do you mean I need a license from HP for something that DEC wrote?") Your patents. Some open source projects have patent clauses with them. Sure, you can do the stuff to license those patents under the terms of the open source license... or chose one that doesn't have them. The former isn't at all in the interest of Oracle; the later is "Here's some BSD code... we don't know what patents are in there, but if you use them we will sue you." Other patents (part 1). Surprise! In open sourcing the software, it is discovered that some intern reused the methods learned at another company in part of the product that has made its way to today. Now you've got the lawyers looking for blood for a decade of royalties. Other patents (part 2) Recognizing that NetApp didn't want ZFS to be open source and there were some cross licensing aspects with Oracle with the ZFS settlement... they'd probably have something to say about it. There's probably some WAFL patents in it now. Competitors. There are things in Solaris that would help competitors to Oracle products. Yes, open sourcing with a copy left license would mean that those competitors would be more challenged to use the software, but its out there. Parteners. There are things in Solaris that help partners. Open sourcing Solaris, while providing good will to the community reduces the leveraging power with the partners for good deals. Some of those partners may also be interested in parts of Solaris not being open source. So... nope. There are lots of legal issues and many business reasons to keep it closed source. Consider also that this is development from March 2010 (first release under Oracle closed source - prior to that it was CDDL) until October 2015 (the last release) and the amount of value that has been added compared to the amount of effort for the above.

Someone 9y ago

Legal concerns: do we really own this code? If there is code in there that turns out to be copy-pasted from somewhere else, open sourcing makes it more likely that people will find it. That could be expensive (e.g. when some BigCo owns the copyright on code they have been selling for decades) and/or have even more serious consequences (e.g. when there's a GPL-licensed code fragment in there, and they linked it with a part they want to keep commercial) Answering that question conclusively can be very expensive. They may not have a full history of the code, and if they have, it may not contain all metadata needed.k

justincormack 9y ago
But it was already open sourced once before, so much of that work was done already.
- Someone 9y ago
  Valid point, so here is a similar, but different reason: patents. They may fear releasing the source opens them for patent lawsuits or may have patents they aren't willing to give up, and fear that open sourcing it without any patent clause will not give them much goodwill.
DonHopkins 9y ago
That's the problem James Gosling encountered trying to convince Sun to release the NeWS source code for free. Parts of it like the font rendering code were owned by AT&T and other companies.

hu88 9y ago

I was at Intel once upon a time when they open sourced some telecom stuff they wanted to get out off. The issues were crazy because of the size of the code base that had accumulated from multiple acquisitions spanning many different divisions in different countries over many years. We couldn't even find people who could tell us what large chunks of the code did or whether they contained anything under patent, trademark etc. It's can be quite expensive and the only reason we did it was there were customers who were willing to pay for the effort.

mjevans 9y ago
How was that not already a liability?
- ci5er 9y ago
  From (my) GP: > some telecom stuff they wanted to get out off. I'm guessing that it might well have been?
johannes1234321 9y ago
Sun did that a few years back, Oracle only has to reevaluate what was added since they acquired Sun ...
- tw04 9y ago
  It's entirely possible everything added since it was acquired by Sun is STILL under an open source license. Just because they haven't released the code or provided it to end-users under that license says nothing about how it's structured internally.
exikyut 9y ago
Out of curiosity, what was the (presumably now open-sourced and discussable) "telecom stuff"?
- lawl 9y ago
  My guess would be oFono: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFono https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFono

akuri 9y ago

All we need is the trademark for Solaris, so that illumos can use its historical name. This should be much easier.

DonHopkins 9y ago
While they're at it, Oracle should free the Sun logo too! I imagine they have the poor thing locked up in a vault somewhere.

shagie 9y ago

Sanitization. Remove all things that shouldn't be there. I recall the cleaning of the code - things where developers got a bit... salty - for the Mozilla open source project. Stuff that people really didn't want others to see. Copyright. That intern who worked at SGI or NetApp who (un)knowingly reused some of a project they had on their laptop at their new place of employment that was actually software owned by their old place of employment. Scrubbing that or getting proper (open source) licensing for that bit, along with all the legal headaches that entails. Remember that we're talking about code that has been around since effectively 1982 with Sun UNIX 0.7 (or SunOS 4 as Solaris 1.x in 1991). Licensed from other. I recall that various parts of non-Sun operating systems had licensing for parts of NFS. It wouldn't be surprising to find that parts of Solaris had licensing from other companies too. Including code directly licensed likely wouldn't be compatible with the license from the other company. Removing the licensed code to make it linkable is an option, but a time consuming one that diminishes the value of the overall project ("what do you mean I need a license from HP for something that DEC wrote?") Your patents. Some open source projects have patent clauses with them. Sure, you can do the stuff to license those patents under the terms of the open source license... or chose one that doesn't have them. The former isn't at all in the interest of Oracle; the later is "Here's some BSD code... we don't know what patents are in there, but if you use them we will sue you." Other patents (part 1). Surprise! In open sourcing the software, it is discovered that some intern reused the methods learned at another company in part of the product that has made its way to today. Now you've got the lawyers looking for blood for a decade of royalties. Other patents (part 2) Recognizing that NetApp didn't want ZFS to be open source and there were some cross licensing aspects with Oracle with the ZFS settlement... they'd probably have something to say about it. There's probably some WAFL patents in it now. Competitors. There are things in Solaris that would help competitors to Oracle products. Yes, open sourcing with a copy left license would mean that those competitors would be more challenged to use the software, but its out there. Parteners. There are things in Solaris that help partners. Open sourcing Solaris, while providing good will to the community reduces the leveraging power with the partners for good deals. Some of those partners may also be interested in parts of Solaris not being open source. So... nope. There are lots of legal issues and many business reasons to keep it closed source. Consider also that this is development from March 2010 (first release under Oracle closed source - prior to that it was CDDL) until October 2015 (the last release) and the amount of value that has been added compared to the amount of effort for the above.