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

by: Shiv

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 02:12:37 +0000

Nice post. Dual licensing has its use - It was invented so that the businesses could continue their existing way of dealing with commercial licenses and in parallel contribute to open source by dual licensing under an OSI approved license.

Now talking about a product being dual licensed under 2 different opensource licenses (CDDL & GPL) is a different issue altogether and bound to misfire as you have rightly noted.

by: Ché Kristo

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 02:02:33 +0000

I agree with you on that, dual licensing *could* have some disastrous outcomes if combined with poor management of the community. I wasn’t so much commenting directly on your article but the current state of affairs with regard to the license debate, we are in heated and emotional debates over a license that hasn’t even been finalised yet. Am I the only one that thinks this is silly?

by: mark

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 22:19:29 +0000

Kangcool: Your summary is what I’m hearing from many “Sun fans”, but I think it’s detached from the reality I see out there so I’m going to politely disagree with you on both fronts.

First I don’t really see the GPL (by which I presume you mean “Linux”) folks screaming *anything* about OpenSolaris. Which in my opinion is the real problem that Sun might be trying to address. Currently, that crowd just doesn’t care about Solaris or OpenSolaris. How do you engage that community? Do you need to?

Secondly, as an independent consultant doing Linux, BSD, Solaris, and OS X work, I just don’t see the biz community being scared of the GPL. I can tell you right now that *every* shop I go into is already running Linux. Every. Single. One. They may not be running it everywhere, but they’re running it. So I’m not convinced the GPL “risk” is actually a factor in enterprise adoption any more.

So what’s this dual licensing thing about? Simply attracting more developers from the Linux world? Leveraging other GPL’ed open source projects and communities? Linux device drivers? As I’ve stated the person who’s apparently pushing this idea (namely, Jonathon) needs to clearly state why they’re going down this road at all. Leaving it up to speculation isn’t wise, IMHO.

I am open to the idea of using an alternative license, perhaps simply as a way of “bridging the gap” to other development communities. I firmly believe, however, that dual licensing an operating system that you’re trying to build a development community around is suicide. It will drive people away, not bring them in.

by: mark

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 19:00:29 +0000

Ché: Did you even read my post? I’m saying that dual licensing is suicide, irregardless of which licenses are proposed…

by: Kangcool

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 14:50:09 +0000

This is the problem sun has got. You got the whole GPL basic screaming that Solairs sucks because of its crap licence.

The you got the whole biz community screaming at you that their scared of GPL as these all kinds of things like ip their trying to protect.

So what does sun do - they to come up with an answer to keep both camps happy.

Odds that will ever happen? Nill, you ever seen a happy GPL nut?

Its a bad place to be in, and it will be intresting to see if this dual licence will do anything to quieting the gpl sun fud factiory.

by: Ché Kristo

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 11:29:28 +0000

Step 1 - Wait and see what the actual license is before we start making up our minds

Step 2 - Put it to the community for a vote.

Problem solved…