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Enterprise Customers Question Sun's Open-Solaris Efforts

Posted by dave on · 1 comment
eWEEK Linux
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The company is exploring the idea of eschewing the GPL for unique licenses and customers wonder Sun's commitment to open-source licensing.

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Comments (1)

This entire article is nothing but a GPL smear if you ask me. Just one example:

"We realize that there are some complaints in the community around the GPL and recognize that the BSD [Berkeley Software Division] license is also not necessarily perfect for all applications," Schwartz told eWEEK in an interview at JavaOne. "So we want to come up with a license that is approved by those that are in a position to determine the validity of an open-source license, as well as one that appeals to as broad a segment of the population as possible."

What complaints in the community are there about the GPL? Maybe he is referring to the Microsoft community. The GPL prevents companies like Microsoft from taking the code, closing it up, changing it's behavior and using it against the people who authored it in the first place. Yes, I would agree that if they put it under a BSD type license that this could happen, but not under the GPL.

Another of many examples:

Other longtime Solaris users said that they welcome being able to look at the Solaris code but that they do not support any possible hand-over of control of Solaris to the open-source community. "Just look at Linux. Even the shipped kernel of the different distributions isn't the same," said Thomas Nau, head of the Communication and Information Center's Infrastructure Department at the University of Ulm, in Germany.

Just how would putting the source under the GPL be "handing over control"? This is insane. Nobody would be stopping Thomas from getting his Solaris from Sun. They only way anyone would want to get it from someone else is if they made it "better". That's a problem? I can't imagine Solaris, even as an open source project going very far. I believe Linux has surpassed it some time ago.

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