Monday, January 24, 2005
Sun's open letter to IBM - too little, too late
Dear Jonathan:SUN's donations to open source are appriciated, but your hardware is overbuilt and overpriced, and your developer base castrated by age and neglect, and I doubt that pleading for support in public with IBM is going to save you.
Although I applaud your company's upcoming release of Solaris 10 as open source, I think the advantages of releasing an OS as free software - GPL'ed - has been graphically demonstrated by the marketplace, and you'll make little headway against Linux unless you GPL it, and worse, by making your license incompatible with the GPL neither Solaris or Linux will be able to benefit as much from either in the ongoing battle against Microsoft. (remember them?)
From Open Source Foes:
- For OpenSolaris, Sun worked up its own open-source license, the Common Development and Distribution License. (Actually, the CDDL is modeled on the open-source license for the Firefox and Mozilla Web browsers.) A key feature of the CDDL is that it lets CDDL-licensed code be stitched together with non-CDDL code -- even proprietary code.
Sun's CDDL also explicitly licenses patents, and Sun says it will include 1,670 patents that go along with OpenSolaris code. But those patents can only be used with Sun's code. Changing the code means losing the patent protection. That's a much more limited deal than IBM's recent contribution of 500 patents for use with any open-source code.
Those CDDL features are heresy to Linux-style open-source advocates. And in practice, they mean it will be nearly impossible for anyone to distribute software that intermixes Linux and OpenSolaris code. The GPL and CDDL terms simply aren't compatible.
I do think that SUN die-hards will leap in and massively improve your OS beyond what any can now envision, and unlock the true powers of your multi-core hardware. I have great hopes for that.
But: I think you'd better get used to being a much smaller company.
I wish I could help you, I have fond memories of SUN gear, especially in the pre-solaris days, and your company has been an integral part of the internet revolution.
Best wishes,
Mike Taht ¶ 6:33 PM
