Larry Rosen has raised on this list the question: is the commons really fractured by the use of incompatible licenses? That is, are there Real World examples of code which can't be incorporated into a GPL-or-similar-licensed program because of license incompatibility? I think the answer is now clearly "yes".
Sun has a file system called ZFS, and they have released two implementations. One, the full-featured implementation, is released under the CDDL, which is GPL-incompatible; the other, under the GPL, was originally intended only for use with the GRUB boot loader, and is technically inferior -- in particular, it is read-only. There seems to be quite a bit of interest in ZFS, and many people wish to use it in Linux systems: it's a technically advanced file system in many respects, the equal or even the superior of those used with Linux today. But although adapting ZFS technically to the kernel would be straightforward, it can't happen because of the CDDL vs. GPL incompatibility. It would be possible in principle to re-engineer ZFS from scratch, as it would be possible in principle to re-engineer gcc. But as far as I know no one is trying to do that. It's just too big a job. In particular, a substitute product will not do (there are other C compilers, even open source ones): what's needed here is something that reads and writes exactly what the full ZFS implementation does, bit for bit, and in all ways behaves identically. The evidence that people want to use it is twofold: the read-only implementation is being added to Linux, and the full implementation is being run on Linux in userland, which reduces performance but bypasses the GPL. If people want these inferior implementations, they would surely use the full and fully integrated version. Do people know of other specific cases? I'd like to hear of them either publicly on the list or privately and in confidence. -- John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ccil.org/~cowan The penguin geeks is happy / As under the waves they lark The closed-source geeks ain't happy / They sad cause they in the dark But geeks in the dark is lucky / They in for a worser treat One day when the Borg go belly-up / Guess who wind up on the street. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
