The Gnu, the Penguin and the Sun

There have been some rumors that Sun will dual-license Solaris as CDDL/GPLv3. If they're smart, they will. Here's why.

First we need to understand why Sun used CDDL instead of GPLv2. I think CDDL was designed to be GPLv2-incompatible on purpose, so no code from Solaris could be used in Linux. If code was copied from Solaris to Linux, that would mean any advantages of Solaris over Linux would disappear.

Where do you go for Linux support? Anywhere. Where do you buy hardware that has been tested to work with Linux? Anywhere. Where do you get the same things for Solaris? From Sun. Everyone knows a lot about Linux, only Sun has real Solaris experts. That's why Sun wants to keep the advantages of Solaris out of Linux.

The problem with this is that users like GPLv2 more than CDDL, I won't go into the details of the reasons.

Now, consider what will happen if Sun licenses Solaris as GPLv3. There still won't be any code copied from Solaris to Linux, because Linux is GPLv2-only, and will never be GPLv3 because all those hundreds of contributors would have to give their permission, never mind that Linus doesn't even want to do this because he doesn't like GPLv3.

Suddenly Solaris will be the most RMS-blessed kernel, instead of Linux. Suddenly there will be a much larger group of users who prefer Solaris over Linux than there is now.

Will Sun use this opportunity? Who knows? I hope so. More GPL'ed software is good, especially if it uses the latest version of the GPL. Will you switch to Solaris then? I know I will.

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