http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5656047.html
SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz on Tuesday
proclaimed ardent support for the open-source software realm but criticized
the General Public License, a widely used foundation of the programming
movement.
The GPL governs Linux and countless other projects in the free and open-source
software arena. But a key tenet of the license creates a situation that
amounts to economic imperialism, Schwartz argued at the Open Source Business
Conference here.
Naturally, Schwartz presented an alternative, Sun's Community Development and
Distribution License, or CDDL, an open-source license that's a variant of the
earlier Mozilla Public License (MPL). Sun has begun releasing its Solaris
source code under the CDDL in a project called OpenSolaris. Solaris is now
free, though Sun sells support.
Schwartz singled out the GPL provision that says source code may be mixed with
other code only if the other code also is governed by the GPL. That provision
is intended to create a body of software that must remain liberated from
proprietary constraints. But Schwartz said that some people he's spoken to
dislike it because it precludes them from using open-source software as a
foundation for proprietary projects.
"Economies and nations need intellectual property (IP) to pull themselves up
by their own bootstraps. I've talked to developing nations, representatives
from academia and manufacturing companies that had begun to incorporate GPL
software into their products, then...found they had an obligation to deliver
their IP back into the world," Schwartz said.
The GPL purports to have freedom at its core, but it imposes on its users "a
rather predatory obligation to disgorge all their IP back to the wealthiest
nation in the world," the United States, where the GPL originated, Schwartz
said. "If you look at the difference between the license we elected to use
and GPL, there are no obligations to economies or universities or
manufacturers that take the source code and embed it in (their own) code."
The GPL is being modernized, but its creator, Richard Stallman, has said the
core tenet isn't going to change. And that tenet hasn't deterred programmers
so far: The GPL is used in 68 percent of the thousands of projects tracked by
the Freshmeat indexing site.
Representatives of the Free Software Foundation, which oversees the GPL,
didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Sun is trying to ally itself with the open-source programming movement as part
of a strategy to turn around its ailing fortunes. The company's revenue and
stock price have remained largely flat in recent years despite a recovery in
Sun's core market, powerful server computers at the heart of corporate
networks.
Open-source software, despite being available for free, will help Sun
financially, Schwartz said. "We're expecting more revenue," he said, citing
historical parallels with the company's support of the now universal TCP/IP
networking standard and the widely used Java software.
Schwartz also took on critics--and there are several--who have objected to
Sun's refusal to release Java as open-source software. "Our refusal has
nothing to do with Sun being proprietary and everything to do with wanting to
keep Java from forking," he said, mentioning that Microsoft is not among the
900 companies that govern the technology's future via the Java Community
Process.
One Java critic is Linux seller Red Hat, whose operating system competes
directly against Sun's Solaris. Schwartz has said more than once that Sun has
Red Hat squarely in its competitive crosshairs.
Tuesday, though, Schwartz tried to present a more collegial view.
"There is a community of communities in the open-source world. The
open-sourcing of Solaris just increases the number and diversity of the
community," he said. "It's not about being a predator on one set of people;
it's about validating open source."
Schwartz also predicted that companies that pledge support for open-source
software but that keep their own products proprietary will eventually be
exposed as hypocrites and fall by the wayside
He mentioned no specific targets for this accusation, but Sun has leveled a
similar criticism at IBM. Its WebSphere, Tivoli and Lotus software remains
proprietary despite Big Blue's programming help with Linux and creation of
the open-source Eclipse programming tools.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 20:27:06 EDT