Uros Nedic <ur...@live.com> wrote: > market. Certainly Sony and other companies > will continue to use Linux under GPLv2. Even > Linus is not for that Linux make transition from > GPLv2 to GPLv3. We could think that one of > reasons is big sponsorship contracts of Linux > Foundation with large hardware companies. > > =A0 If OpenSolaris make transition=2C it'd be *first* > OS under GPLv3. Very soon we could expect that > some company release same product as Sony > PlayStation 3=2C for example=2C but now with software > licensed under GPLv3. All GNU stack will instantly
GPLv3 is not a way to go. Solaris needs to be able to combine OSS (CDDL) and other code. This does not work with the GPLv3. The GPLv3 gives even less openness than the GPLv2. While the GPLv2 allows to link a GPL program against any libray of any license (because the GPLv2 is limited to the work that is published under GPLv2), the GPLv3 tries to aritificially introduce additional restrictions. These restrictions that are written in a very vague way, so it is a legallity risk for projects that use GPLv3. Background: Since the second half of the 1990s, the FSF spreads incorrect claims about the compatibility of GPLv2 with other code. The FSF claims that things are eforcable that are not even written in the GPLv2 text. The GPL analysis from Lawrence Rosen (the lawyer of the OpenSource initiytive) in http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch06.pdf explains word by word, sentence by sentence which claims from the GPLv2 are not enforcable and thus void and which if the claims of the FSF are not written in the GPL text. A lot of OSS software can only exist because certain claim of the GPLv2 are not enforcable. The GPLv3 is more restrictive than GPLv2 (and thus closer to what the FSF claims for the GPLv2) and it contains contains vague claims about what cannot be combined with GPLv3 code and thus causes a legal risk. Another legal risk with the GPLv3 is that you may add exceptions that give your users more freedom but the GPLv3 allows downstream redistributors to remove these opening exceptions before redistributing the code. I know of OSS projects that converted to GPLv3 and that had to go back to GPLv2 because the users of the code could no longer use it because of legal problems that resulted from GPLv3. Please note: this is a OpenSolaris discussion and no license discussion. A license discussion will not bring us anywhere..... Jörg -- EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin j...@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
