Dual license OpenSolaris? You’d might as well just kill it now.

This whole dual licensing idea has just got to stop. Now. Why? It could easily kill the project. This year. Maybe even this quarter. Really. License ambiguity is an open source community killer. It’s toxic. Developers fear it. Instinctively. Worse than license ambiguity? License forking. And that’s what a dual license would allow. License incompatible forks of the code. Anyone with even a small amount of historical perspective on UNIX and BSD should fear license forking like the devil himself.

Which is why this idea Sun is tossing around is so bloody insane. The fact that executives at Sun don’t seem to realize just how risky even talking about it is worries me. The fact that they’ve actually framed the entire GPLv3 debate under the context of dual-licensing, like it’s a given? Well, that literally sent a chill down my spine. Go read the first page of responses on the forum. You can smell the fear. Fear that this isn’t a community project afterall. Fear that we’ve been betrayed. Fear that Sun actually thinks that what works for a development model like MySQL would work for OpenSolaris. Fear of what that implies for the community.

Rational or not, these types of thoughts are what emerge once licensing wars start to erupt. I’ve seen these holy wars before. Many have. They never end well.

I think what many people in the community have been getting caught up about is “Why choose GPLv3? What do we gain?”. Even as a relatively impartial outsider, I still haven’t formed a solid opinion on all the risks / rewards from that one. There’s a lot to consider, and it’s presumably why Sun opened the debate to being with. What I completely disagree with, however, is that this discussion should be taking place under the assumption that OpenSolaris could be successfully *dual* licensed. Like you could appease both license camps. What I am saying then, for the recond, is this:

Dual licensing OpenSolaris would instantly polarize and split the community, creating a world of code and community problems that could *never* be undone. I personally think it would sour the entire project, and ultimately be its undoing.

What needs to happen now? Well they need to nix the dual idea. Pronto. Then, Jonathan Schwartz himself needs to join the discussion and list the reasons why OpenSolaris would be better served by the GPL. As far as I’m concerned, even trying to explain how dual licensing might work is an excercise in futility, and the longer that idea lives the more harm will be done to the project.

Then we can move on to the more interesting discussion. Who gets to decide if OpenSolaris changes licenses?

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Published:
Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 1:32 am
Author:
mark
Category:
opensolaris, solaris