Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on March 19, 2005 05:18 PM
Complicated? Nice propaganda Sun. The GPL is simple. You can make changes to the source code and keep the changes secret as long as you don't distribute the code outside your organization. If however, you decide to use the hard work of others as a basis for your own work which would not work without the base of the GPL'd work, then you must distribute the resulting code along with the application or hardware that you include the code with.
You are free to do the work of creating an operating system yourself, or whatever GPL'd work you'd like to use, or you can pay others to do it. If so, then you can release the work under whatever license you wish, as Sun has done. If you don't want to do this and want to use GPL'd work instead, then as part of the bargain of freely using thousands or tens of thousands of other people's work, you must allow your work to be freely used by others. Don't like it? Don't use the GPL'd code. Or use it, but only within your organization without distributing it. Very simple.
As to why Sun can't go "full" open source, it isn't complicated either. They don't want to GPL their work. That's it. Very simple. They don't want to make their software Free Software. They want it to appear "open", when in fact it is not. So they use a tortured term like "closed open source". If it weren't so sad, it'd be funny. But the only thing it really is, is predictable. As I predicted Sun would never release Solaris under the GPL <A HREF="http://newsvac.newsforge.com/comments.pl?sid=42356&cid=102518" title="newsforge.com">here</a newsforge.com> on 11/29/04, well before they made any announcement about the actual license and while they were posting that they were "open sourcing" Solaris. At that time they didn't state that they would need to redefine open source as "closed open source" to fit into their newly expanded definition of open source.
That Sun couldn't bring themselves to open source (in the true sense of the phrase) Java is no suprise, they had the same problem with Solaris.
The bottom line is that Sun is doomed. I'll repost that November '04 post, as well as another separately so it doesn't get cut off.
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GPL complicated?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on March 19, 2005 05:18 PMYou are free to do the work of creating an operating system yourself, or whatever GPL'd work you'd like to use, or you can pay others to do it. If so, then you can release the work under whatever license you wish, as Sun has done. If you don't want to do this and want to use GPL'd work instead, then as part of the bargain of freely using thousands or tens of thousands of other people's work, you must allow your work to be freely used by others. Don't like it? Don't use the GPL'd code. Or use it, but only within your organization without distributing it. Very simple.
As to why Sun can't go "full" open source, it isn't complicated either. They don't want to GPL their work. That's it. Very simple. They don't want to make their software Free Software. They want it to appear "open", when in fact it is not. So they use a tortured term like "closed open source". If it weren't so sad, it'd be funny. But the only thing it really is, is predictable. As I predicted Sun would never release Solaris under the GPL <A HREF="http://newsvac.newsforge.com/comments.pl?sid=42356&cid=102518" title="newsforge.com">here</a newsforge.com> on 11/29/04, well before they made any announcement about the actual license and while they were posting that they were "open sourcing" Solaris. At that time they didn't state that they would need to redefine open source as "closed open source" to fit into their newly expanded definition of open source.
That Sun couldn't bring themselves to open source (in the true sense of the phrase) Java is no suprise, they had the same problem with Solaris.
The bottom line is that Sun is doomed. I'll repost that November '04 post, as well as another separately so it doesn't get cut off.
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