Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

Linus Torvalds Takes on OpenSolaris, GPLv3, Sun’s “open source” initiatives

http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/12/232

Some choice predictions from Linus on Sun, OpenSolaris, and GPLv3 rumors. It’s easy to imagine that I agree with Linus here – Sun tends to talk open source, but walk closed/controlled source. (hence, low developer participation – remember Sun’s participation buzzword??)  I’ve said it before, so nothing new here from me – I’ll let Linus do the talking ;-)

Some choice quotes:

– first off: they may be talking a lot more than they are or ever will
be doing. How many announcements about Sun and Linux have you seen over
the years? And how much of that has actually happened?

- They may like open source, but Linux _has_ hurt them in the
marketplace. A lot.
…
- Ergo: they’ll not be releasing ZFS and the other things that people are
drooling about in a way that lets Linux use them on an equal footing. I
can pretty much guarantee that. They don’t like competition on that
level. They’d *much* rather take our drivers and _not_ give anythign
back, or give back the stuff that doesn’t matter (like core Solaris:
who are you kidding – Linux code is _better_).
- They may release the uninteresting parts under some fine license. See
the OpenSolaris stuff – instead of being blinded by the code they _did_
release under an open source license, ask yourself what they did *not*
end up releasing. Ask yourself why the open source parts are not ready
to bootstrap a competitive system, or why they are released under
licenses that Sun can make sure they control.
…
So to Sun, a GPLv3-only release would actually let them look good, and
still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them
to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the
joys of license fragmentation).