Alan DuBoff writes: > On Thu, 9 Aug 2007, James Carlson wrote: > > 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?
No, I didn't say that. Sun is the author and can do as it pleases. > Certainly the underlying system is CDDL and/or other licenses, but how > does that effect ZFS sitting on top? I didn't say anything like that, either. Please see what I wrote above. A BSD license would *NOT* confer patent rights for the implementation of ZFS to recipients. We could have published it that way. But if we did, then nobody could have used it at all. That makes it _worse_ than CDDL. > > 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. One clear issue with the standard BSD license is that it doesn't deal with IPR. There are other (more arcane) issues having to do with the right to distribute modified versions of the source, which is one reason why CDDL is different. (And, yes, I've imported BSD things into Solaris, and it's not always easy precisely because of those holes -- not all of which I understand myself; I'm not a lawyer.) I share the concern about having a license that everyone can understand and use and (most importantly) _trust_. I don't think that wishing for a BSD-only world fixes that problem. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677 _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
