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Congratulations to JB and team on completing this Herculean task! I had the pleasure of meeting JB when he and I shared a ride from the airport in Porto Alegre

Congratulations to JB and team on completing this Herculean task! I had the pleasure of meeting JB when he and I shared a ride from the airport in Porto Alegre for this year's FISL.[1] When he asked me what I was going to be presenting on, I (not yet knowing anything about JB's work) had some trepidation in responding: my presentation was on corporate open source anti-patterns[2] -- and one of my conclusions was that the GPL has essentially outlived its usefulness. Fearing that this was a very controversial conclusion, I approached it gingerly in my conversation with JB; needless to say I was very relieved to learn that he and the VLC team had come to broadly similar conclusions -- and surprised that they felt so strongly that they had taken on the arduous task of relicensing. Congratulations again to JB and team; I'm sure that they join the ranks of us who never want to engage in a(nother) licensing discussion as long as we live! [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2012/08/01/post-revolutionary-open-source/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2012/08/01/post-revolutionary-op... [2] http://smartos.org/2012/07/27/corporate-open-source-anti-patterns-doing-it-wrong/ http://smartos.org/2012/07/27/corporate-open-source-anti-pat...

jbk 14y ago
Thanks :)
georgeorwell 14y ago
From your second link, why do you think the licenses of DTrace and ZFS have limited their Linux popularity? Aren't their licenses compatible with (read: convertible to) the GPL?
- throwaway54-762 14y ago
  At least with ZFS, no: "Porting ZFS to Linux is complicated by the fact that the GNU General Public License, which governs the Linux kernel, is incompatible with the Sun CDDL under which ZFS is distributed."[0] See also this reasoning from the native ZFS linux kernel module port: "In a nutshell, the issue is that the Linux kernel which is licensed under the GNU General Public License is incompatible with ZFS which is licensed under the Sun CDDL. While both the GPL and CDDL are open source licenses their terms are such that it is impossible to simultaneously satisfy both licenses. This means that a single derived work of the Linux kernel and ZFS cannot be legally distributed."[1] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Linux [1]: http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue

jbk 14y ago

Thanks :)

georgeorwell 14y ago

From your second link, why do you think the licenses of DTrace and ZFS have limited their Linux popularity? Aren't their licenses compatible with (read: convertible to) the GPL?

throwaway54-762 14y ago
At least with ZFS, no: "Porting ZFS to Linux is complicated by the fact that the GNU General Public License, which governs the Linux kernel, is incompatible with the Sun CDDL under which ZFS is distributed."[0] See also this reasoning from the native ZFS linux kernel module port: "In a nutshell, the issue is that the Linux kernel which is licensed under the GNU General Public License is incompatible with ZFS which is licensed under the Sun CDDL. While both the GPL and CDDL are open source licenses their terms are such that it is impossible to simultaneously satisfy both licenses. This means that a single derived work of the Linux kernel and ZFS cannot be legally distributed."[1] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Linux [1]: http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue