On Thu, 9 Aug 2007, James Carlson wrote: > Alan DuBoff writes: >> The only thing I would have done different given the limited resources in >> engineering, would have been to license under the BSD 3 clause so that >> anyone, any system, could have taken the code to incorporate into their >> system, even Linux. > > I suspect that would have been much worse. ZFS (like many things in > OpenSolaris) has patented technology behind it. Among other things, > the CDDL provides users with grants for those patents, so that they > can actually *use* the bits provided.
Possibly so, but ZFS is all new code. Are you saying that Sun couldn't license that as BSD had they wanted? Certainly the underlying system is CDDL and/or other licenses, but how does that effect ZFS sitting on top? > The BSD 3-clause license does no such thing. Not directly, but the BSD is an accepted license for pretty much all of the open source community, and considered to be one of the best open and free licenses available. It is certainly one of the few to have stood up in a court of law. For a non-lawyer type as myself, that seems pretty good if you want your code to be accepted. > I realize that (as non-lawyers) we're all very fond of short-and-sweet > licenses on software, even if they're riddled with legal holes, and > treat IPR like Mizaru. The standard BSD license is that. I'm not sure how the BSD is riddled with holes, it has stood up in court. AFAIK, no other popular license has gone through that, GPL included. Maybe I'm wrong. -- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
