Sun to Add GPLv3 to OpenSolaris? 118
An anonymous reader writes to mention that sources inside Sun Microsystems claim that OpenSolaris may see the GPLv3 added to its list of licenses soon. From the article: "While Sun officials would not confirm the plan to dual-license OpenSolaris under the CDDL and GPLv3, Tom Goguen, vice president of Solaris software at Sun, told eWEEK that other open-source technologies will play a big role in Solaris going forward. 'Take the GNU Userland, which is an interesting piece of technology that Sun is looking at closely, and we may do something similar with, say, a container flavor,' he said. 'You can also expect to see a renewed focus on the needs of developers and system administrators with Solaris going forward, while individual pieces of the next version will also likely be increasingly delivered first as components or technologies targeted at vertical markets,' he said."
Good Strategic Move (Score:5, Interesting)
Releasing OpenSolaris under GPLv3 might be a good strategic move. Right now GPLv3 is in limbo, with some projects moving to it and some not. The main purpose of GPLv3 is to try to stop submarine patents from the industry in general, but Microsoft in particular, from being used to undermine the process. So imagine Suse using GPLv2 competing against some other distro like RedHat, or Ubuntu, which has moved to GPLv3 for the code they contribute. They get the added value of swapping code with OpenSolaris, which has some really cool stuff and Sun gets the benefit of undermining MS's new strategy, which of course is as detrimental to Sun as anyone else, by making Suse Linux an outdated distro.
ZFS (Score:2, Interesting)
Sun is the leading open source company (Score:3, Interesting)
So this shouldn't come as a surprise.
Alex
Win all around (Score:2, Interesting)
This will change things drastically. Solaris is a mature OS with some unique tools that could really benefit Free Software: DTrace [wikipedia.org], ZFS [wikipedia.org], etc. GPL licensed OS's would really benefit from this stuff. DTrace and ZFS will be included in Mac OS 10.5. But up until now they have been licensed under Sun's CDDL which is incompatible with the GPL [fsf.org].
If Linus ceases to be bull-headed and moves the kernel to GPLv3. The Sun move will be great, Gnu/Linux will be able to integrate these new tools. Sun will be able to use and improve GPL licensed tools more easily. Everyone wins. Except proprietary software developers and MS in particular.
What if Linus continues to be an ass and refuses to license the kernel under GPLv3? Free software developers who do not want their work to be used in DRM or hardware that locks the user out of their software will move towards Gnu/Solaris! The Samba team, Alan Cox, all the GNU projects could all shift focus to Solaris as the default kernel. There is already a Debian-based Gnu/Solaris [gnusolaris.org] and this could become the main focus of Debian work. Would Ubuntu Gnu/Solaris be far behind?
If the second case happens Linus could continue with GPLv2 only for the kernel and see the importance of Linux diminish or he could give in and license it under "GPLv2 or later" and contain the hemorrhage.
Interesting, interesting.