alanc @ sun.com

CDDL basher needs to learn his license facts

Rich Teer posted a detailed rebuttal to Jason Perlow's recent Linux Magazine attack on the CDDL. Unfortunately, it appears Mr. Perlow doesn't know much about the licenses already used by the software included in Linux distros from one of the quotes Rich highlights:

Perhaps its just me, but does anyone else find it particularly obnoxious that Sun finds it completely acceptable to embrace GPL technologies like GNOME and Xfree86 in Solaris, while at the same time prevents cross-pollination of Solaris technology to GPL projects with the CDDL? Sun's strategy is a one-way street...

Perhaps the reason people don't agree is because the statement is wrong on several points. First, XFree86 is not covered by the GPL, but in fact has traditionally been covered by the MIT/X11 license, that is much more like the BSD license than the GPL, and has refused to incorporate any GPL-licensed code. That is until XFree86 4.4, when it adopted a new version of the license that the FSF notes as being GPL-incompatible in its list of open source licenses. (We've actually moved to Xorg in Solaris x86, which while it's based on the XFree86 work, only includes XFree86 code covered by the older license.)

The other point is that while the code being newly released is covered by the CDDL, we honor the licenses for existing code and work with those communities. For instance, our code donations to GNOME projects are covered by the GPL and LGPL as appropriate, and our contributions to X.Org and XFree86 have been under the X11 license. If you look through those code bases you'll find lots of code covered by Sun Microsystems copyrights which we've given back to those communities under their usual terms.

Besides, it hardly seems that a Linux and GPL advocate has much ground to stand on when pontificating about "one way street" licenses - after all, hasn't that been how the GPL has kept Linux and BSD apart for years? Linux can take BSD-licensed code from the BSD projects and use it, but the GPL prevents those projects from taking any code from Linux without changing their license terms - the exact complaint Mr. Perlow makes here about Solaris.

[Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris]

Posted at 11:26PM Feb 21, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in Solaris  |  Comments[2]

Top 3 Questions asked at the X.Org LinuxWorld booth

I spent a lot of the LinuxWorld show in the X.Org booth, talking to people who stopped by to see what we were up to. From both my time and my conversations with the other booth volunteers, I think I can safely say these were the three most frequently asked questions:

1. What am I seeing here? What are you demoing?
2. What's X.Org? What's the difference between X.Org and XFree86?
3. When will Debian include Xorg packages?

For those who didn't get to stop by and ask in person, the answers given were:

1) What am I seeing here? What are you demoing? The demos depended on when you stopped by the booth and who was set up to demo at the time. They included:

Composite Extension

Keith Packard and Jim Gettys were showing off demos using this at various times. While an early version of this extension was included in the Xorg 6.8.0 release last fall, they were demoing from a more recent release using the experimental "xserver" tree on freedesktop.org that has a different acceleration framework better suited to the operations in use. The demos showed how the simple idea of the extension could be used in a variety of powerful ways. The extension just renders all windows to offscreen buffers and then let a special program called a compositing manager take those buffers and transform them any way it wants to render them on the screen. (It's usually coupled with the Damage Extension which lets the compositing manager know when the other programs have updated their windows and which portions of the windows were "damaged" and need to be redrawn.) The simplest demo is just grabbing a window and moving it around in front of others, showing that it can be instantly refreshed from the offscreen buffers instead of waiting for the applications underneath to redraw as you often see in current X environments. One of the most impressive demos had a translucent video player, updating at normal rates, even while it was alphablending with the windows above and beneath it. A more useful demo showed thumbnails of all the windows side by side, showing what they'd look like if they were fully uncovered, even if parts of the real window were obscured. And one of the simplest transformations, scaling, was used to show how this could magnify the screen contents for users with poor vision. (I've talked with some of our accessibility guys at Sun, and we're hoping the GNOME magnifier could be updated to support this soon.)

Xgl

(not to be confused with XGL, Sun's old competitor to IrisGL in the days before everyone agreed to standardize and OpenGL was born) David Reveman stopped by for a bit to show off his OpenGL based X server, again using the power of the Composite extension to do some cool tricks, but this time using the hardware accelerated 3-D drivers for fuller effect. Zooming in and out was smooth and quick. The coolest eye candy though was probably the cute trick he showed off at the Xdevconf as well - he popped up a lightbulb icon to represent the light source, and drug it around the screen, so you could see the window shadows - even under the translucent bits - update in real time. Drag it to one edge of the screen and all the shadows are long out the other side. I know people (including sometimes me) who lose track of the time at the computer - so if the movement of the light source could instead be tied to the time of day, so when we see long shadows pointing to one side, we know it's late in the afternoon without having to look at the clock, it could be an cool subtle reminder of how late it's getting - though the abstraction would break down once you cross into the evening hours when true hackers really get going.

MAS

Leon Shiman had demos set up of music players on one computer sending the bits over the net to come out of speakers attached to another computer. Complex graphs on some monitors showed the myriad ways the MAS components could be mixed and matched for a variety of situations. It also helped make sure we had some nice music to listen to in the lulls between visitors. (Sometimes we'd have 20 visitors at once, then they'd all wander off and there would be no one but us for a few minutes.)

2) What's X.Org? What's the difference between X.Org and XFree86? Compared to the time I spent at the X.Org booth in the August LinuxWorld, fewer people were asking what X.Org is, as they've seen it appear in distros such as Fedora, SuSE, and Ubuntu. Many still didn't know the history - that X.Org is both old and new. It's the descendent of the organizations that have produced the X Window System standards and sample implementations for over two decades - going back to the original MIT X Consortium, but it's also only about a year old, the X.Org Foundation having been unveiled at last year's LinuxWorld Expo in New York. Before that, various developers had decided that the goals and management style of the XFree86 Project didn't match what they wanted to do with X and were looking to form a new X project, while the old X.Org industry consortium was struggling to determine how to become more open and re-energize development that had become stagnant. Both groups had tried working with the leadership of the XFree86 Project, but couldn't come to an agreement with them. They found each other and determined they could work together, and after long discussions, X.Org was reborn as the X.Org Foundation.

The XFree86 Project then decided they wanted to be sure they received full credit for their work and changed their license terms. While they were within their rights to do so, the way it was done and concerns over whether or not the new license was compatible with the GPL caused many distros to look at the new Xorg server offering. The Xorg 6.7.0 release provided a foundation that was very close to the XFree86 4.4 release, and was followed in September by the Xorg 6.8.0 release, which provided the first set of new features developed by X.Org contributors. These releases convinced people that moving to Xorg was worthwhile, and many distros have switched over. You can now find Xorg in many Linux and BSD distros, and even Solaris 10 for x86/x64.

The XFree86 Project still continues to move forward in their own way though - they're currently testing release candidates for a 4.5 release now.

3) When will Debian include Xorg packages? Ahh, the tough one, which different people offered different answers for, including:

• Good question, we wish we knew.
• Their booth is right behind us, why don't you go ask them?
• Once "sarge" ships
• Today, if you grab the Ubuntu packages and install them yourself.
• Ask again later. (when Magic 8 Ball was consulted)

[Technorati Tag: Xorg]

Posted at 08:37PM Feb 21, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in X11  |