Anarchy^WStartup Essentials in the UK

“…Solaris and a whole bunch of development tools are now in the wild as well, albeit only free in the sense of a child wearing reins near an interesting looking cliff.”

Paul on the CDDL license that currently prevents OpenSolaris from being that little bit extra special.

“It requires that all attribution notices be maintained, while the GPL only requires certain types of notices. Also, it terminates in retaliation for certain aggressive uses of patents. So, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason.” – Common Development and Distribution License
“Also unfortunate in the CDDL is its use of the term “intellectual property”.

Best of all though, is Paul’s email to me about this – “Look how I referred to Sun’s license when I blogged it earlier… words like the ones you would use coming out of my mouth. Is your name Tyler Durden?”
In related OpenSolaris news, my pals at Joyent are doing some crazy low pricing on their Accellerators right now. Facebook application developers can still get a free-of-charge account, too.

4 thoughts on “Anarchy^WStartup Essentials in the UK

  1. Matt Lee

    Simon,
    Would you say that the GPLv3 is terminating in retaliation, though?
    The CDDL is a strange license, in that it seems to be almost only Sun using it?

  2. Simon Phipps

    GPLv3: Yes, I would. The point of the patent clause in GPLv3 is to discourage patent activity within a GPLv3 licensed codebase. Its scope is smaller than that used by other licenses for rational reasons, but it’s the same concept. I think the FSF needs to change the paragraph you cite now that GPLv3 is using it too – I recognise their opposition to all weak-copyleft licenses and they need to be up-front that that’s the reason they don’t recommend CDDL and not some content issue in the license.
    CDDL: Well, it’s one of a widely-used class of licenses stemming from the MPL. Sun’s intent in creating it was to fix the “defect” in MPL that led successive corporates to create “vanity” licenses because they had to fix the licensor name and took the opportunity to “fix” other things at the same time. I feel the criticism I see of it that asserts it’s a Sun-only non-Free license is unfair, and I also feel the experiment it represents in trying to stem proliferation has been partly successful (we’re not seeing more MPL clones created). However, I’m a realist! There are a scattering of non-Sun projects using CDDL, but I’d agree that “class C” (strong copyleft) licenses are being more widely used now, including by Sun. The issue you (and Paul) are pointing to is not specific to the CDDL, it’s a characteristic of all “class B” (weak copyleft) licenses, and it’s on my radar…

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