Comment by lizknope
6 years ago
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]
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.
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.
Not at all really. Danese Cooper says that Cantrill is not a reliable witness and one can say he also has an agenda to distort the facts in this way [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22008921
And Cooper's boss:
> 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]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distrib...
So of the available licenses at the time, Engineering wanted BSD and Legal wanted (to wait for) GPLv3, so the compromise was CDDL.