bish at touchtelindia.net wrote: >Having played with Belenix for 4-5 days, I decided to have a >look at the internals of the CD. The first stop was obviously >licencing. > >Of the dozen plus licences placed in the Belenix CD, >the two of importance are the two solaris licences, the >OPENSOLARIS.LICENCE and the OPENSOLARIS.BINARY.LICENCE. > >The OPENSOLARIS.LICENCE has no significant issues. This is the >well published Common Development and Distribution License >(CDDL) available all over on the net. This IS quite cool ! >Perhaps, more lax than even GPL. Hoping that my interpretation >is correct ! > > Yes. CDDL allows you to combine CDDL-ed files with files having another license, even proprietary and create derivative binaries providing that the contents of the CDDL-ed files have not been reused in any of the non-CDDL files - CDDL is a file based license as opposed to GPL which is a project-based license.
This allowance is necessary because Solaris has a whole bunch of third-party software that uses Solaris internal APIs and code. These will become instantly illegal if OpenSolaris were to use GPL. >OTOH, the binary licence is somewhat restrictive (e.g. "You >may not rent, lease, lend or encumber Software" and some other >multi-line sentences, implicating 'conditions apply' which I >could not understand clearly). While I do some more 'googling' >and 'sunning' on these issues, it would be nice if anybody can >throw some light on the following: > >a) Which all components of Navada or Belenix come under the > OpenSolaris 'binary' licence. > > SUN does not own full rights to some of the code in Solaris and thus cannot open-source it. Obviously replacement code needs to be written for these stuff so that those can be open-sourced. But that is the long-term work. A few of these are required components. So in the meantime to allow OpenSolaris distros to be able to build a bootable environment, these restricted components are distributed as binary-only components. These are only a few eg - Math library, a couple of other libs, a few commands, a few kernel modules. You can look at the "O/N Binary-Only Components, English" at http://www.genunix.org/mirror/index.html Some of it is actually a bit silly. Things like "od" (Octal Dump) are closed source because they contain source code derived from Microsoft's Xenix! Now how much effort does it take to rewrite od ? Probably the community can help out with this. >b) Are crucial things like kernel, essential C libs, ZFS, > dtrace and other 'goodies' affected ? > > Nope. The kernel, libc, and all the Solaris 10 new features, are open-source. I guess 90% of the core Solaris source-base in open-source and more are being added. >c) What are the exact implications of these binary licence > components within OpenSolaris/ Belinix etc ? > > The binary components can only be used for building OpenSolaris distros. So I can legally use them in BeleniX. BTW I am not using the closed-source math library in BeleniX. I am using FreeBSD's math library, which I have modified and enhanced. FreeBSD's Math library was in fact donated by SUN back in 1993! Regards, Moinak. >Sorry for poing such naive questions, but genuinely, I am a >0-ist on OpenSolaris and ALL such legal issues ... > >Bish > >_______________________________________________ >ug-bosug mailing list >List-Unsubscribe: mailto:ug-bosug-unsubscribe at opensolaris.org >List-Help: mailto:ug-bosug-request at opensolaris.org?subject=help >List-Owner: mailto:ug-bosug-owner at opensolaris.org >List-Archives: http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ug-bosug > >
