[geeks] Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris bits to be in next version of OSX

[Bryan Fullerton]

On 8/10/06, Scott Howard <scott at doc.net.au> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 04:16:23PM -0400, Bryan Fullerton wrote:
> > The general consensus among the Linux and BSD projects (that I've
> > seen) is that the CDDL license Sun has released it under is too
> > restrictive to allow it to be brought in as a native filesystem, but
>
> You've got that backwards - it's GPL that is far too restrictive, and
> has issues with CDDL.  The reverse is certainly not true.

Yes, for the GPL instead of "too restrictive" I should've said
"incompatible". People involved in Linux development generally see the
world through GPL-coloured glasses, and the CDDL has been declared
incompatible with GPL by the FSF.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html

I'm not sure why you'd say that the CDDL doesn't have issues with GPL
code -- you can't include GPL code in a CDDL app, that would require
that the whole app be re-licensed as GPL.

> I'm not
> aware of any issues with the BSD license and CDDL (either way around).

The CDDL has a GPL-like "must distribute modified source" clause,
though admittedly it's not as viral as the GPL.

For some BSD projects (FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD) this is just something
to be worked around, for others (OpenBSD) it means that CDDL has to be
avoided. Admittedly this is more a project philosophy issue than a
licensing issue.

Integration with any BSD-licensed systems requires writing
wrappers/add-ons for the CDDL code instead of modifying the CDDL code
to work with BSD systems, which has varying degrees of pain depending
how core the code is. There's also generally a requirement that
there's some way to make the CDDL code optional to provide a pure BSD
distribution.

Bryan