Jensen Lee wrote:
Who said anything about software patents? Copyright
& contract
law are enforceable in Europe, but frankly, European
law is irrelevant,
since the contract is between two US-based companies,
and is thus
governed by US law, and would result in lawsuits in
US court if we
decided to break it.
Do these companies Sun have contracts with even exist anymore? If they do how
can they have an interest into non disclosing information on old and no longer
commercially exploited technology? Do Sun care more about the apathic interest
of a defunt organization or that of hundreds of thousands of pissed-off
professional customers?
Look, it's contract law, and it's an effort (often non-trivial) to get
these contracts changed. You can't change a contract license just
because you want to (or, for that matter, because you can't find the
other party). We have to go to every vendor we licensed code from (and
remember, some of this is 15+ years old now), and re-negotiate being
able to Open Source their code. It's a huge effort, logistically.
And, many of those companies don't have the commitment to Open Source
Sun makes, so much of it is going to be wasted effort.
We went through this when the JDK was Open Sourced, which is why even
though 95% of the JDK is now GPL'd, there still are binary-only plugs.
It's a decidedly non-trivial effort, which costs non-trivial $$, and may
very well not pan out in the end. And where is the revenue stream to
offset this cost?
Frankly, it's a better idea to see if we (or some other helpful soul)
can implement support for the various cards into Xorg (which comes with
it's own challenges, but is a more sure bet).
As already noted, we cannot make the current Xsun
available for
separate download due to other license issues in Xsun
itself.
Please could you expand on the license issues you mention? Why would I be denied to run
on my own workstation with OpenSolaris a software component that Sun provides for other
Solaris versions if these are provided or sold separately? Xsun is an "X"
server and as such I could run it anywhere I like.
Will then Sun prohibit OpenSolaris users to run on OpenSolaris other commercial
close source applications?
I am afraid this does not make sense.
The license restrictions are REDISTRIBUTION restrictions. Not USE
restrictions. So, if you happen to have a legally-obtained copy of Xsun
from [say] older Solaris 10 media, you can happily install and run it
legally on your own workstation with OpenSol. We just can't make
available for download Xsun unless it's bundled into a Solaris release
[i.e. 10, 9, etc].
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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