Monday April 18, 2005

Simon Phipps on Open Source Licensing
If you've ever met Simon Phipps, you'll know that he's articulate and intelligent and committed to evangelizing things he is passionate about - including things open source.  He was one of the driving forces behind the Chairman's Award winning blogs.sun.com effort which has enabled many passionate and committed folks from Sun to connect to peers and customers in an altogether new way.  Simon sports a beard and one of those British accents that we Yankees find so charming.  And, this past weekend, he posted an excellent writeup on open source licensing, CDDL and the current OSI debate about license proliferation - titled Failed as in succeeded wildly.  It's well worth the time to read. Check it out.

Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag:Solaris

(2005-04-18 16:52:11.0) Permalink Comments [1]

CDDL - Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
The CDDL open source license certainly seems to be misunderstood by a few vocal critics, although it's also been positively assessed by some respected open source leaders as well. 

I led the team that created the CDDL open source license and am simultaneously flattered by all the attention and shocked at some of the ludicrous things that I've read.  Geez.  Thanks to Andy for correcting some of the misconceptions.  The controversy reminds me of the mantra I've written about before - although it makes me want to change it to: "It's not about the license, it's about the community." That it takes a community to build good software is worth repeating.  Our success in building the OpenSolaris community will have less to do with the open source license and more to do with our ability to attract developers, to convince the market that OpenSolaris is real and to spread the word about the OpenSolaris innovations.  (Perhaps we'll need to get some of those nifty Get Firefox buttons and banners for OpenSolaris to help spread the word...)

The core OpenSolaris team realized early in the planning for OpenSolaris that we needed to use a "true" open source license - a license that complies with the terms of the Open Source Definition and that encourages royalty-free use, modification and distribution.

It took others inside Sun a bit longer.  If I were better at recounting stories, perhaps I could tell the then-dramatic (now kind of boring and corporate in retrospect) tale of the OpenSolaris licensing debate that took place inside Sun before CDDL existed.  There were some influential and intelligent people who wanted us to use what I call a "half-pregnant" source license, in which the source would only be "open" for non-commercial use and a licensee would have to pay for commercial use of the technology.  Ick.  (Obviously we did not follow this path...)

There were others inside Sun who pushed hard for GPL. For a brief two week period, I was also one of the GPL lobbyists, until I realized how important it was for us to allow OpenSolaris kernel source files to be compiled and linked with other open source files and even with proprietary source files in the kernel.  GPL would not allow this.  On Day 1 of OpenSolaris, because some OpenSolaris IP is encumbered by other companies (example - 3rd party drivers), we're going to have some source files in the kernel that will remain proprietary.  Hence GPL was out of the running.

We also looked carefully at the BSD family of licenses.  After all, Solaris has its roots in BSD source code.  Concerns about the lack of an explicit patent grant in the BSD license aside, a few of us strongly felt that if someone makes modifications to OpenSolaris source files and then distributes those modifications, they should "share" the modifications they made to the source files.  (Note - if they author new code, in separate source files, and distribute the resulting binaries but want to keep the new source files private, that's fine with us.)  The BSD license has few terms, and the requirement to "share" modifications definitely isn't one of them.  So, ultimately, BSD was out of the running as well. 

The MPL class of open source license (on which CDDL is based) had a number of attractions.  First, it does require that the source code for modifications be shared.  Second, it allows the covered source files to be mixed with other open source files and with proprietary source files.  It also has an explicit patent grant.  Keeping in mind that we want businesses and startups and developers to feel comfortable that they don't just have a copyright grant but also a patent grant, this mattered to us.

We also felt that having some kind of  "anti-patent litigation" provision (as sometimes seen in the Mozilla class of licenses) was also valuable.  My small team couldn't fix the patent problem (although Larry Lessig has called on all of us to speak up and help here, as he lambasted Verizon, Disney and Microsoft for their "war against the freedom to innovate" at the recent OSBC.)  But my team could take steps to make sure that the OpenSolaris license discouraged patent litigation.  As Danese Cooper aptly described the CDDL "patent peace" provision - "if you pee in the pool, you have to get out."  So, if you choose to initiate a patent claim that involves OpenSolaris CDDL software, all the rights you've received to the CDDL OpenSolaris technology from all the OpenSolaris community members is severed - you effectively have to get out of the pool. 

Unfortunately, we could not use the MPL for OpenSolaris.  Open source licensing has evolved a bit in recent years and we needed to make some adjustments.  In doing so, we bent over backwards to craft a license that would be useful not only to OpenSolaris but to the broader open source community - we did not want to create yet another vanity license.  Perhaps we could have stayed off the radar screen by simply revising the Sun Public License (our very own vanity license, a clone of the MPL) - but I didn't want other companies to have to create yet another MPL-derived vanity license to fix some of these same issues.  Of course, some projects will want to use the respected Apache license, or a BSD license, or GPL - but for those projects that want to use an MPL-class license, well, I wanted CDDL to be an attractive option.  Hence we created a common MPL-class open source license, in which the license steward could not change the terms out from underneath a community.

As some members of the open source community will tell you - John Cowan, Chuck Swiger, Rod Dixon and Danese Cooper of OSI, and I would hope even PJ of Groklaw would confirm - we revised CDDL in response to community input last December.  And if it turns out that we've overlooked something that requires further improvement in CDDL, do let me know, so that we can deal with it.

In the meantime, "it's not about the license, it's about the community" - so I'm going to focus on that just now rather than let myself be distracted by what Tim Bray calls the bad craziness. 

Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag:CDDL

(2005-04-18 00:25:30.0) Permalink Comments [10]