> We've wasted enough effort over obscure licensing minutia.
Which was precisely Sun/Oracle's goal when they released ZFS under the purposefully GPL incompatible CDDL. Sun was hoping to make OpenSolaris the next Linux whilst ensuring that no code from OpenSolaris could be moved back to linux. I can't think of another plausible reason why they would write a new open source license for their open source operating system and making such a license incompatible with the GPL.
Some people argue that Sun (or the Sun engineer) as creator of the license made the CDDL intentionally GPL incompatible.[13] According to Danese Cooper one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible.[18]
Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part
of the design when they released OpenSolaris. ... the engineers who wrote Solaris
... had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that.
> Simon Phipps (Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at the time), who had introduced Cooper as "the one who actually wrote the CDDL",[19] did not immediately comment, but later in the same video, he says, referring back to the license issue, "I actually disagree with Danese to some degree",[20] while describing the strong preference among the engineers who wrote the code for a BSD-like license, which was in conflict with Sun's preference for something copyleft, and that waiting for legal clearance to release some parts of the code under the then unreleased GNU GPL v3 would have taken several years, and would probably also have involved mass resignations from engineers (unhappy with either the delay, the GPL, or both—this is not clear from the video). Later, in September 2006, Phipps rejected Cooper's assertion in even stronger terms.[21]
So of the available licenses at the time, Engineering wanted BSD and Legal wanted GPLv3, so the compromise was CDDL.
Danese Cooper, one of the people at Sun who helped create the CDDL, responded in the comment section of that very video:
Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL. That was one of the design points of the CDDL. I was in that room, Bryan and you were not, but I know its fun to re-write history to suit your current politics. I pleaded with Sun to use a BSD family license or the GPL itself and they would consider neither because that would have allowed D-Trace to end up in Linux. You can claim otherwise all you want...this was the truth in 2005.
I don't think something that is the subject of an ongoing multi-billion-dollar lawsuit can rightly be called "obscure licensing minutia." It is high-profile and its actual effects have proven pretty significant.
It's not just licensing. ZFS has some deep-rooted flaws that can only be solved by block pointer rewrite, something that has an ETA of "maybe eventually".
You can't make a copy-on-write copy of a file. You can't deduplicate existing files, or existing snapshots. You can't defragment. You can't remove devices from a pool.
That last one is likely to get some kind of hacky workaround. But nobody wants to do the invasive changes necessary for actual BPR to enable that entire list.
> We've wasted enough effort over obscure licensing minutia.
Which was precisely Sun/Oracle's goal when they released ZFS under the purposefully GPL incompatible CDDL. Sun was hoping to make OpenSolaris the next Linux whilst ensuring that no code from OpenSolaris could be moved back to linux. I can't think of another plausible reason why they would write a new open source license for their open source operating system and making such a license incompatible with the GPL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distrib...
Some people argue that Sun (or the Sun engineer) as creator of the license made the CDDL intentionally GPL incompatible.[13] According to Danese Cooper one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible.[18]
And the very next paragraph states:
> Simon Phipps (Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at the time), who had introduced Cooper as "the one who actually wrote the CDDL",[19] did not immediately comment, but later in the same video, he says, referring back to the license issue, "I actually disagree with Danese to some degree",[20] while describing the strong preference among the engineers who wrote the code for a BSD-like license, which was in conflict with Sun's preference for something copyleft, and that waiting for legal clearance to release some parts of the code under the then unreleased GNU GPL v3 would have taken several years, and would probably also have involved mass resignations from engineers (unhappy with either the delay, the GPL, or both—this is not clear from the video). Later, in September 2006, Phipps rejected Cooper's assertion in even stronger terms.[21]
So of the available licenses at the time, Engineering wanted BSD and Legal wanted GPLv3, so the compromise was CDDL.
Wow... talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. Oracle ended up abandoning OpenSolaris within a year or so.
Edit: Nevermind, debunked by Bryan Cantrill. It was to allow for proprietary drivers.
2 replies →
There were genuine reasons for the CDDL - it wasn't an anti-gpl thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=youtu.be...
Danese Cooper, one of the people at Sun who helped create the CDDL, responded in the comment section of that very video:
Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL. That was one of the design points of the CDDL. I was in that room, Bryan and you were not, but I know its fun to re-write history to suit your current politics. I pleaded with Sun to use a BSD family license or the GPL itself and they would consider neither because that would have allowed D-Trace to end up in Linux. You can claim otherwise all you want...this was the truth in 2005.
11 replies →
I don't think something that is the subject of an ongoing multi-billion-dollar lawsuit can rightly be called "obscure licensing minutia." It is high-profile and its actual effects have proven pretty significant.
> Honestly just use ZFS. We've wasted enough effort over obscure licensing minutia.
I am willing to bet that Google had the same thought. And I am also willing to bet that Google is regretting that thought now.
It's not just licensing. ZFS has some deep-rooted flaws that can only be solved by block pointer rewrite, something that has an ETA of "maybe eventually".
Care to elaborate?
You can't make a copy-on-write copy of a file. You can't deduplicate existing files, or existing snapshots. You can't defragment. You can't remove devices from a pool.
That last one is likely to get some kind of hacky workaround. But nobody wants to do the invasive changes necessary for actual BPR to enable that entire list.
1 reply →