Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
> Sun Mulls Deeper Open-Source Dive
<quote>
Further muddying the waters is the chaotic state of affairs at the GPL
license administrator, the Free Software Foundation, which is struggling
to write a new version of the license and has taken fire from Torvalds
for threatening the intellectual property of companies that might use
it. On Apr. 25, Eben Moglen, who ran the foundation's legal affairs,
resigned.
Perhaps most important, not everyone at Sun thinks GPL Solaris is the
right way to go. "It's way primitive to be thinking about this," says
Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open-source officer. The license was "perfect
for Java," since its requirement that users republish their
modifications to Java's source code prevents proprietary versions [see
BusinessWeek.com, 7/5/06, "Sun: Brew-It-Yourself Java?"]. But Solaris,
an outgrowth of the Berkeley Software Distribution version of Unix that
Sun co-founder Bill Joy wrote in the '70s, comes from a different
tradition. More than 30,000 programmers have worked on OpenSolaris
projects, and things won't change without their say-so, Phipps says.
"They're pretty skeptical about using the GPL," he says, "no matter how
enthusiastic Jonathan is."
</quote>
Related:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=851
<quote>
Unfortunately a lot of people conflate open source with the GPL, but
this is simply wrong: both the GPL and the BSD derived licenses
translate the open tradition of academic exchange and information re-use
to the world of intellectual property and civil litigation, but the GPL
carries something the BSD's don't: a political message embedded in its
viral components.
Thus it's perfectly reasonable for anyone, individual or corporation, to
use BSD licensed code in a for profit enterprise - but anyone signing on
with the GPL has to have independent means of support - like rich
parents, a day job, or an emperor's clothing con like Red Hat's pretence
to selling expensive support for free software while actually licensing
expensive software with some free support.
You and I can probably afford to admire and perhaps even practice the
social ideals driving GNU, but most people in real socialist paradises
like North Korea, Cuba, or Communist China have their freedoms, and
their economic opportunities, ruthless suppressed - because Stallman's
ideal: economic communism, can only exist where somebody else picks up
the tab.
Absent that handy rich parent, economic communism requires the
imposition of its own antithesis: totalitarianism, to survive - and that
reality leads to a bitter bottom line: chess is not checkers, when we
confuse open source with the GPL and inflict Stallman's viral provisions
on developing economies, we're not helping them; what we're doing is
exporting hobbies for the rich and hobbles for the poor.
</quote>
regards,
alexander.
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