Re: Sun's ZFS and Linux

[Tarkan Erimer <tarkane@gmail.com>]

The whole picture is more clear now. Thanks for
this very informative reply.

Regards

On 11/21/05, Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> wrote:
> 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...
>
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