I know it would be wonderful to just wrap the licensing conspiracy theories up in a pretty bow because it fits your logical conclusions, but it isn't that simple.
I'm not saying that Danese is lying, just that she is wrong. There is a difference. Danese may have believed that it was done for the reasons she claims, but that doesn't make it so just because it's convenient to believe it.
There are far more people that have said that Danese is wrong that are qualified to do so; with that, I feel safe in saying she is wrong (nevermind my own involvement).
Who else would be? And yes, she did write the CDDL according to both herself and according to Simon Phipps, certainly it was scrutinised and possibly altered by Sun legal staff, but her writing it (as per the prerequisites made to her by Sun management) is undisputed. It doesn't matter if the licence was based upon MPL, the final licence is not MPL, it instead reflects the requests put upon Danese by that of Sun's management (and legal staff).
>but that doesn't make it so just because it's convenient to believe it.
You are the one denying the words of Danese while offering nothing whatsoever to support your claims.
All you are doing is to claim that trusting the words of the person who wrote the licence is akin to buying into 'conspiracy theories', nevermind that everything she said also makes perfect sense from a business standpoint.
If anything comes across as a 'fairy tale', it's the idea that Sun would allow Linux to incorporate Sun's technical advantages at a point where they were losing to Linux in the marketplace.
The person who wrote the licence claims she was told to prevent this, business logic strongly supports her claims, yet you pretend it's some 'conspiracy theory' while offering nothing to support your claims.
>I'm not saying that Danese is lying, just that she is wrong.
Come on, she is either lying or she is telling the truth, you keep trying to dance around this. She (Danese) wrote the licence (nothing has been put forth disputing this), she says that making it GPLv2 (Linux) incompatible was a prerequisite. She either lies or she is telling the truth.
I believe her because:
A) I can't think of any reason for her to lie B) it makes perfect sense from a business perspective
>There are far more people that have said that Danese is wrong that are qualified to do so
How are they qualified?
You are the one denying the words of Danese while offering nothing whatsoever to support your claims.
Nonetheless she is wrong to characterise the opinion of
the Solaris engineering team in the way she does. She is
speaking this way because she lost an argument inside
Sun, not because her view is representative of the views
of Sun or its staff in the way she claims. She, along
with many actual engineers, was an advocate of using GPL
for OpenSolaris but the need to release rather than wait
for one of {GPL v3, Mozilla license revision, encumbrance
removal} meant that this was not possible. I am still
furious with her for the statement she made at DebConf,
which was spiteful and an obstacle to a united FOSS
movement.
S. (Simon Phipps)
http://web.archive.org/web/20110605051830/http://www.opensol...
If anything comes across as a 'fairy tale', it's the idea
that Sun would allow Linux to incorporate Sun's technical
advantages at a point where they were losing to Linux in
the marketplace.
http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2006/11/13/a-rising-t...
Others have pointed out that this is demonstrably false as well. Have you also forgotten when Apple was considering integrating ZFS into OS X?
Your argument also seems specious given that the only "OS" that had issues with integrating DTrace or other CDDL-licensed technology was Linux. Apple and many others have had no problem integrating it. So if Sun was really not willing to give up their competitive advantage, why would they give away technology under a license that was reasonable for almost every competitor?
As others have also pointed out, not everyone believes that the CDDL and GPL are as incompatible as many would like to claim.
It's just like the silliness you see in the Linux kernel today where some kernel symbols are marked with a special macro EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL?
http://lwn.net/Articles/154602/
If the GPL was strictly incompatible in all cases, then why is the extra silliness needed?
Whatever the CDDL was designed or hoped to do, the ultimate question of what it /will/ do may someday be decided by a court. In the meantime, Oracle - which is notoriously well-equipped with lawyers - apparently believes that the CDDL-vs-GPL question does not prevent it from porting DTrace to Linux. If someone disagrees with them strongly enough to… well, do what, exactly? …that will be entertaining.
In the meantime, why does anyone bother to argue about whether Danese wrote the CDDL, didn't write it, knew what Sun was really after in writing it, or tap-danced naked down Sandhill Road while writing it?DTrace is coming to Linux, CDDL or no CDDL. That ought to be cause for rejoicing, not flogging the dead license horse.
Imagine that at a previous company you worked for - and one where you signed a standard confidentiality agreement - you were privy to a sensitive legal matter.
After you leave the company, there is much public speculation about that legal matter.
You can weigh in, and share the sensitive legal details that you were privy to - that are not publicly known. Would you? Should you? Can you?
Does this help explain?
I doubt anything new is going to be found by continuing these discussions. I can say what will be found going forward - exciting new observability made possible by DTrace on Linux.
Agreed, and just to make something clear, me believing that Sun did indeed create CDDL to be incompatible with GPLv2 is not something I hold against Sun at all, contrary I think it was the 'right' thing to do given their circumstances as a company, had I been a shareholder I would have been angry if they gave away technology 'crown jewels' to their main competitor.
On the other hand, wearing my Linux user hat I really want to have this great technology at my disposal :) (something which is now thankfully being rectified by things like DTrace / ZFS on Linux)
Anyway, as I said, this is what I 'believe', it doesn't mean it is the _truth_, I've just yet to come across anything factual which would make me think otherwise.