7 ms·

There's a very interesting talk on the matter by Bryan Cantrill where he explained that the gpl was unsuitable for their scope for a number of valid reasons, in

by znpy 6y ago

There's a very interesting talk on the matter by Bryan Cantrill where he explained that the gpl was unsuitable for their scope for a number of valid reasons, including the fact that the gpl vitality would have affected indipendent hardware vendors too, iirc. And some more cases. I hope I didn't write bs, however here is the talk of you want to know more and with more details: https://youtu.be/Zpnncakrelk https://youtu.be/Zpnncakrelk (leaping the chasm from proprietary to open: a survivor's guide) As usual Bryan Cantrill is just brilliant at explaining stuff. Edit: just to be explicit: it was NOT about keeping stuff out of Linux.

toyg 6y ago
It's sad that even a brilliant person like Bryan can get opensource so horribly wrong at a fundamental level. Right at the beginning, he says F/OSS established itself because it leapt ahead technologically, not because "all that freedom / user rights stuff"; he totally fails to see how that "user rights stuff" is what allowed the jump to happen - because even developers are users when they first encounter a piece of software. Without the rights of users to read source, tweak it to their liking, and republish it, there is no right for developers to enable the technological leap. I hope Bryan simply chose a poor turn of phrase. He makes another poor turn when he says that the CDDL kept stuff out of Linux, but "not because of the CDDL but because of perceptions of the GPL" (i.e. IHVs didn't want to deal with the GPL). The license and the choice of using it are two different things. Sun could have written a license that was not GPL (to satisfy IHVs) but was compatible with GPL. They did not. Danese Cooper, who was part of that effort, says this was on purpose, and stated it on record ( http://caesar.ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/theora-small/2006-05-14/tower/OpenSolaris_Java_and_Debian-Simon_Phipps__Alvaro_Lopez_Ortega.ogg http://caesar.ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debcon... from 27:30). I guess Bryan was one of those engineers Danese mentions as "having some biases" back then. It was certainly obvious, at the time, what a careful avoidance of a license compatible with the biggest Solaris competitor would have resulted in, from a practical and commercial standpoint.
- nix23 6y ago
  >Sun could have written a license that was not GPL (to satisfy IHVs) but was compatible with GPL Why? Why even care about GPL? It's 100% compatible to MIT/BSD/ISC and that's enough, even Linus said that he probably would choose the ISC today, he chose mainly the GPL because GCC had it...and now they have GPLv3 (an absolute shit decision if you ask me).
  - toyg 6y ago
    (ISC is a troublesome license, but that's beyond the point) Licenses are not adopted in a vacuum. The license is what made GCC what it was when Linus had to pick a license, and arguably what made Linux what it is today. A "BSD Linux" would have likely ended up the same way BSD systems have: a largely academic project routinely cannibalized by behemoth closed-source companies. The question, yesterday and today, is really "why not care about the GPL?". The rights it grants are what made the F/OSS ecosystem what it is today. If you want to grant more rights to your users and developers, by all means use a less restrictive but compatible license like modified BSD, or MPL 2. It's easier to do that without fear of withering, now that opensource is the de-facto default choice in a lot of fields. It definitely was not as easy back in the '90s or early '00s, which is when the GPL effectively fought the war for the whole field. If you choose to stick with pre-MPL2 derivatives, though, you are clearly not interested in granting users and developers the same basic rights as the GPL.
    - nix23 6y ago
      Look the problem is, you CAN make Linux as proprietary as you want if you DON'T redistribute it, like google, so google cannibalizes Linux too. It's just a different vision, if you want real freedom and want to work with a community go with BSD/MIT. >ended up the same way BSD systems have: a largely academic project routinely cannibalized by behemoth closed-source companies. That's BS, just look at how Netflix and Dell EMC work with FreeBSD. And for example Juniper, they learned a lesson not working with the community and fell far behind because of that. https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html
trasz 6y ago
To make a license GPL-compatible, it needs to be a subset of GPL. Which means, to make ZFS GPL-compatible, Sun would need to ditch patent protection, among other things. That would create real problems for everyone, while not really helping ZFS on Linux - Linux devs would simply find another excuse; case in point is AdvFS.
- toyg 6y ago
  I don't think AdvFS ever reached the level of community buy-in that ZFS has. A lot of people in Linux land really like ZFS, IMHO both demand and supply to sustain an in-kernel ZFS is there already. > ditch patent protection [...] would create real problems for everyone What problem, exactly?
  - trasz 6y ago
    The problem is the risk of being sued into oblivion by Oracle. Which currently doesn't exist thanks to CDDL patent protection clauses.
    - toyg 6y ago
      Are you arguing that users of MIT/BSD licensed software the world over are "at risk" of being sued by the copyright holder for patent infringement...? Big if true.
      - trasz 6y ago
        MIT/BSD it’s the same as GPL in this aspect; it’s CDDL that’s different by providing patent protection.
        toyg 6y ago
        yes, so you're saying MIT/BSD licenses should be considered at risk of lawsuits for patent infringement (presumably from the same copyright holder that released the code in the first place)? If that were a realistic threat, most F/OSS projects should shut down tomorrow. The patent-protection clauses of the CDDL are at odds with the spirit and practice of open licenses anyway, since they are voided as soon as the relevant code is modified. So basically, the cddl ships clauses that are pointless and likely to be disregarded in practice and in court. Losing them would make no difference whatsoever.

by znpy 6y ago

toyg 6y ago

It's sad that even a brilliant person like Bryan can get opensource so horribly wrong at a fundamental level. Right at the beginning, he says F/OSS established itself because it leapt ahead technologically, not because "all that freedom / user rights stuff"; he totally fails to see how that "user rights stuff" is what allowed the jump to happen - because even developers are users when they first encounter a piece of software. Without the rights of users to read source, tweak it to their liking, and republish it, there is no right for developers to enable the technological leap. I hope Bryan simply chose a poor turn of phrase. He makes another poor turn when he says that the CDDL kept stuff out of Linux, but "not because of the CDDL but because of perceptions of the GPL" (i.e. IHVs didn't want to deal with the GPL). The license and the choice of using it are two different things. Sun could have written a license that was not GPL (to satisfy IHVs) but was compatible with GPL. They did not. Danese Cooper, who was part of that effort, says this was on purpose, and stated it on record ( http://caesar.ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/theora-small/2006-05-14/tower/OpenSolaris_Java_and_Debian-Simon_Phipps__Alvaro_Lopez_Ortega.ogg http://caesar.ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debcon... from 27:30). I guess Bryan was one of those engineers Danese mentions as "having some biases" back then. It was certainly obvious, at the time, what a careful avoidance of a license compatible with the biggest Solaris competitor would have resulted in, from a practical and commercial standpoint.

nix23 6y ago
>Sun could have written a license that was not GPL (to satisfy IHVs) but was compatible with GPL Why? Why even care about GPL? It's 100% compatible to MIT/BSD/ISC and that's enough, even Linus said that he probably would choose the ISC today, he chose mainly the GPL because GCC had it...and now they have GPLv3 (an absolute shit decision if you ask me).
- toyg 6y ago
  (ISC is a troublesome license, but that's beyond the point) Licenses are not adopted in a vacuum. The license is what made GCC what it was when Linus had to pick a license, and arguably what made Linux what it is today. A "BSD Linux" would have likely ended up the same way BSD systems have: a largely academic project routinely cannibalized by behemoth closed-source companies. The question, yesterday and today, is really "why not care about the GPL?". The rights it grants are what made the F/OSS ecosystem what it is today. If you want to grant more rights to your users and developers, by all means use a less restrictive but compatible license like modified BSD, or MPL 2. It's easier to do that without fear of withering, now that opensource is the de-facto default choice in a lot of fields. It definitely was not as easy back in the '90s or early '00s, which is when the GPL effectively fought the war for the whole field. If you choose to stick with pre-MPL2 derivatives, though, you are clearly not interested in granting users and developers the same basic rights as the GPL.
  - nix23 6y ago
    Look the problem is, you CAN make Linux as proprietary as you want if you DON'T redistribute it, like google, so google cannibalizes Linux too. It's just a different vision, if you want real freedom and want to work with a community go with BSD/MIT. >ended up the same way BSD systems have: a largely academic project routinely cannibalized by behemoth closed-source companies. That's BS, just look at how Netflix and Dell EMC work with FreeBSD. And for example Juniper, they learned a lesson not working with the community and fell far behind because of that. https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html

trasz 6y ago

To make a license GPL-compatible, it needs to be a subset of GPL. Which means, to make ZFS GPL-compatible, Sun would need to ditch patent protection, among other things. That would create real problems for everyone, while not really helping ZFS on Linux - Linux devs would simply find another excuse; case in point is AdvFS.

toyg 6y ago
I don't think AdvFS ever reached the level of community buy-in that ZFS has. A lot of people in Linux land really like ZFS, IMHO both demand and supply to sustain an in-kernel ZFS is there already. > ditch patent protection [...] would create real problems for everyone What problem, exactly?
- trasz 6y ago
  The problem is the risk of being sued into oblivion by Oracle. Which currently doesn't exist thanks to CDDL patent protection clauses.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Are you arguing that users of MIT/BSD licensed software the world over are "at risk" of being sued by the copyright holder for patent infringement...? Big if true.
    - trasz 6y ago
      MIT/BSD it’s the same as GPL in this aspect; it’s CDDL that’s different by providing patent protection.
      - toyg 6y ago
        yes, so you're saying MIT/BSD licenses should be considered at risk of lawsuits for patent infringement (presumably from the same copyright holder that released the code in the first place)? If that were a realistic threat, most F/OSS projects should shut down tomorrow. The patent-protection clauses of the CDDL are at odds with the spirit and practice of open licenses anyway, since they are voided as soon as the relevant code is modified. So basically, the cddl ships clauses that are pointless and likely to be disregarded in practice and in court. Losing them would make no difference whatsoever.