4 ms·

There were genuine reasons for the CDDL - it wasn't an anti-gpl thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=youtu.be&t=1375 https://www.youtube.c

There were genuine reasons for the CDDL - it wasn't an anti-gpl thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=youtu.be&t=1375 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=youtu.be...

morning_gelato 7y ago
Danese Cooper, one of the people at Sun who helped create the CDDL, responded in the comment section of that very video: Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL. That was one of the design points of the CDDL. I was in that room, Bryan and you were not, but I know its fun to re-write history to suit your current politics. I pleaded with Sun to use a BSD family license or the GPL itself and they would consider neither because that would have allowed D-Trace to end up in Linux. You can claim otherwise all you want...this was the truth in 2005.
- ilikejam 7y ago
  I stand corrected!
- toyg 7y ago
  Yeah, it's hard to understand this without context. Sun saw D-Trace and ZFS as the differentiators of Solaris from Linux, a massive competitive advantage that they simply could not (and would not) relinquish. Opensourcing was a tactical move, they were not going to give away their crown jewels with it. The whole open-source steer by SUN was a very disingenous strategy, forced by the changed landscape in order to try and salvage some parvence of relevance. Most people saw right through it, which is why SUN ended up as it did shortly thereafter: broke, acquired, and dismantled.
- notacoward 7y ago
  This needs to be more widely known. Sun was never as open or innovative as its engineer/advertisers claim, and the revisionism is irksome. I saw what they had copied from earlier competitors like Apollo and then claimed as their own ideas. I saw the protocol fingerprinting their clients used to make non-Sun servers appear slower than they really were. They did some really good things, and they did some really awful things, but to hear proponents talk it was all sunshine and roses except for a few misguided execs. Nope. It was all up and down the organization.
  - wolfgke 7y ago
    > Sun was never as open or innovative as its engineer/advertisers claim, and the revisionism is irksome. For (the lack of) openness, I agree, but the claim that they were not innovative needs stronger evidence.
    - notacoward 7y ago
      Just to be clear, I'm not saying they weren't innovative. I'm saying they weren't as innovative as they claim. Apollo, Masscomp, Pyramid, Sequent, Encore, Stellar, Ardent, Elxsi, Cydrome, and others were also innovating plenty during Sun's heyday, as were DEC and even HP. To hear ex-Sun engimarketers talk, you'd think they were the only ones. Reality is that they were in the mix. Their fleetingly greater success had more to do with making some smart (or lucky?) strategic choices than with any overall level of innovation or quality, and mistaking one for the other is a large part of why that success didn't last.
      - admax88q 7y ago
        Java was pretty innovative. The worlds most advanced virtual machine, a JIT that often outperforms C in long running server scenarios, and the foundation of probably 95% of enterprise software.
        notacoward 7y ago
        ANDF had already done (or at least tried to do) the "write once, run anywhere" thing. The JVM followed in the footsteps of similar longstanding efforts at UCSD, IBM and elsewhere. There was some innovation, but "world's most advanced virtual machine" took thousands of people (many of them not at Sun) decades to achieve. Sun's contribution was primarily in popularizing these ideas. Technically, it was just one more step on an established path.
        admax88q 7y ago
        Sure plenty of the ideas in Java were invented before, standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. The JIT came from Self, the Object system from Smalltalk, but Java was the first implementation that put all those together into a coherent platform.
- throw0101a 7y ago
  And Cooper's boss: > Simon Phipps (Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at the time), who had introduced Cooper as "the one who actually wrote the CDDL",[19] did not immediately comment, but later in the same video, he says, referring back to the license issue, "I actually disagree with Danese to some degree",[20] while describing the strong preference among the engineers who wrote the code for a BSD-like license, which was in conflict with Sun's preference for something copyleft, and that waiting for legal clearance to release some parts of the code under the then unreleased GNU GPL v3 would have taken several years, and would probably also have involved mass resignations from engineers (unhappy with either the delay, the GPL, or both—this is not clear from the video). Later, in September 2006, Phipps rejected Cooper's assertion in even stronger terms.[21] So of the available licenses at the time, Engineering wanted BSD and Legal wanted GPLv3, so the compromise was CDDL.

morning_gelato 7y ago

Danese Cooper, one of the people at Sun who helped create the CDDL, responded in the comment section of that very video: Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL. That was one of the design points of the CDDL. I was in that room, Bryan and you were not, but I know its fun to re-write history to suit your current politics. I pleaded with Sun to use a BSD family license or the GPL itself and they would consider neither because that would have allowed D-Trace to end up in Linux. You can claim otherwise all you want...this was the truth in 2005.

ilikejam 7y ago
I stand corrected!
toyg 7y ago
Yeah, it's hard to understand this without context. Sun saw D-Trace and ZFS as the differentiators of Solaris from Linux, a massive competitive advantage that they simply could not (and would not) relinquish. Opensourcing was a tactical move, they were not going to give away their crown jewels with it. The whole open-source steer by SUN was a very disingenous strategy, forced by the changed landscape in order to try and salvage some parvence of relevance. Most people saw right through it, which is why SUN ended up as it did shortly thereafter: broke, acquired, and dismantled.
notacoward 7y ago
This needs to be more widely known. Sun was never as open or innovative as its engineer/advertisers claim, and the revisionism is irksome. I saw what they had copied from earlier competitors like Apollo and then claimed as their own ideas. I saw the protocol fingerprinting their clients used to make non-Sun servers appear slower than they really were. They did some really good things, and they did some really awful things, but to hear proponents talk it was all sunshine and roses except for a few misguided execs. Nope. It was all up and down the organization.
- wolfgke 7y ago
  > Sun was never as open or innovative as its engineer/advertisers claim, and the revisionism is irksome. For (the lack of) openness, I agree, but the claim that they were not innovative needs stronger evidence.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    Just to be clear, I'm not saying they weren't innovative. I'm saying they weren't as innovative as they claim. Apollo, Masscomp, Pyramid, Sequent, Encore, Stellar, Ardent, Elxsi, Cydrome, and others were also innovating plenty during Sun's heyday, as were DEC and even HP. To hear ex-Sun engimarketers talk, you'd think they were the only ones. Reality is that they were in the mix. Their fleetingly greater success had more to do with making some smart (or lucky?) strategic choices than with any overall level of innovation or quality, and mistaking one for the other is a large part of why that success didn't last.
    - admax88q 7y ago
      Java was pretty innovative. The worlds most advanced virtual machine, a JIT that often outperforms C in long running server scenarios, and the foundation of probably 95% of enterprise software.
      - notacoward 7y ago
        ANDF had already done (or at least tried to do) the "write once, run anywhere" thing. The JVM followed in the footsteps of similar longstanding efforts at UCSD, IBM and elsewhere. There was some innovation, but "world's most advanced virtual machine" took thousands of people (many of them not at Sun) decades to achieve. Sun's contribution was primarily in popularizing these ideas. Technically, it was just one more step on an established path.
        admax88q 7y ago
        Sure plenty of the ideas in Java were invented before, standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. The JIT came from Self, the Object system from Smalltalk, but Java was the first implementation that put all those together into a coherent platform.
throw0101a 7y ago
And Cooper's boss: > Simon Phipps (Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at the time), who had introduced Cooper as "the one who actually wrote the CDDL",[19] did not immediately comment, but later in the same video, he says, referring back to the license issue, "I actually disagree with Danese to some degree",[20] while describing the strong preference among the engineers who wrote the code for a BSD-like license, which was in conflict with Sun's preference for something copyleft, and that waiting for legal clearance to release some parts of the code under the then unreleased GNU GPL v3 would have taken several years, and would probably also have involved mass resignations from engineers (unhappy with either the delay, the GPL, or both—this is not clear from the video). Later, in September 2006, Phipps rejected Cooper's assertion in even stronger terms.[21] So of the available licenses at the time, Engineering wanted BSD and Legal wanted GPLv3, so the compromise was CDDL.