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April 14, 2005
With Friends Like These
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
Sun's plan to release Solaris under its CDDL open source license got a boost yesterday with an endorsement by...The SCO Group? (This cute Linux penguin keychain from Promotion Potion doubles as a stress ball.)
"We have seen what Sun plans to do with OpenSolaris and we have no problem with it," is the way eWeek's Steven Vaughan-Nichols quoted SCO's Darl McBride in a conference call yesterday.
The question is, with friends like these, does Sun need enemies?
Sun's CDDL has been controversial among open source purists. The license restricts what you can do with the Sun software. Still, the license has been approved by OSI (meaning it can be called an open source license), and Computer Associates wants to build a template from it that will cover all commercial open source.
Despite continuing setbacks in its legal battle with IBM to establish ownership of Linux, SCO still acts like it's the one and true owner of all Unix, and thus all Linux. Now, it seems Sun has bowed to that contention -- that's how SCO is trying to spin things anyway.
I'm waiting to see what comment Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz makes about this on his blog, if any.
His silence might speak volumes.
Comments (4)
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Brad Hutchings on April 14, 2005 01:19 PM writes...
"Open source purists"... I have a new analogy about "open source" as a movement to share with you. Think of "open source" proponents as vegetarians, and the GPL crowd as vegans. Imagine you're a regular, healthy, college educated carnivore and you get the urge to steam some vegetables and peppers and rice and skip the cow, chicken, and fish one night. Then you're like many companies who make the source code of a product available as a tactic. Maybe the product is near end of life. Maybe it is a product where source can truly be helpful to the kinds of customers who use it. Well, you steam your veggies and your rice and the snot nosed card-carrying Vegetarian friend/nephew/neighbor of yours bitches at you because you have raw meat in your refrigerator, poisoning everything including your intentions. Sun uses the CDDL (a simplified Mozilla public license) instead of Stallman's silly political screed and the established "open source" crowd views Sun with suspicion. It's enough to make you want to boil tofu in cow's blood just for spite.
But the funniest part of this is how downright French the open source movement has become...
It's worse than French, in fact. It's the Atkins attitude. If I want to go low carb, I can't just eat cooked cow and slices of swiss cheese. No, I have to have everything Atkins approved, right down to the Atkins(TM) French Bread.
Whatever happened to the days when you could offer a gift without having to kiss everyone's collective, um, ring first?
Permalink to Comment2. Alan Dekon on April 15, 2005 08:23 PM writes...
I read the CDDL differently - I am MORE free to use it in my products, as a files based license, without being forced to give up my secret sauce to all my competitors.
I love the MPL - it leaves ME with the choice, unlike GPL which mandates its lifestyle and social model on everyone. And rather than deploying the duplicity of the MySQL "variant," at least Sun is being faithful to the community.
Permalink to Comment3. Anonymous on April 15, 2005 08:39 PM writes...
I'm really disappointed in your analysis, Dana. You're as bad as SCO in spewing venom against any approach that differs from your own myopic view of the world.
Permalink to Comment4. wpsmoke on April 23, 2005 06:20 PM writes...
Dana is not too bad. He could have pointed out that Sun helped fund SCO to the tune of a couple of million dollars (along with Microsoft's larger payment) which enabled SCO to claim some credibility at a time when open source movement was trying to rally together to discredit SCO's claims.
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