Messages in this thread | | | From | Rob Landley <> | Subject | Re: Sun's ZFS and Linux | Date | Mon, 21 Nov 2005 11:24:48 -0600 |
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On Sunday 20 November 2005 15:12, Tarkan Erimer wrote: > Thanks for the explanation. BTW, I wonder something: Is there any > possibility to give GPL an exception to include and/or link to CDDL > code?
No, and Sun likes it that way.
The GPL was the first "copyleft" style license which requires that derivative works be placed under exactly the same terms as the original work. If the terms of another code are incompatible, they cannot be exactly the same.
(Specifically, the GPL says in section 2b, "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License." See "http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html" and "http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses".)
Sun intentionally designed the CDDL to be incompatible with the GPL. This was a design goal on Sun's part.* They want to isolate themselves from the existing open source community, and make sure that their code cannot be used with the most common open source license.** Why they want to do this has been widely speculated about***, but the fact they want an explicit "us vs them, no sharing" stance is not in dispute.
Rob
* See http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2127094/sun-slams-predatory-gpl or http://news.com.com/Sun+criticizes+popular+open-source+license/2100-7344_3-5656047.html or http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=10927 plus Sun's official rationale at http://www.sun.com/cddl/CDDL_why_details.html
** According to http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=13 there are currently 72,823 projects on sourceforge specifying a license. Of those, 48050 have chosen to license their code under the GPL. That's 65.98%, or about 2/3 of the total. In politics, this would be flirting with a veto-proof majority. David Wheeler did a detailed analysis at http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html
*** see http://lwn.net/Articles/114839/ or http://lwn.net/Articles/159248/ or http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1754155,00.asp or http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1739000,00.asp or http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid39_gci1060779,00.html or http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40176.html or http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2126648/sun-hits-back-open-source-critics or... - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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