Thursday November 30, 2006 Will Sun Use GPLv3?
Over the last few weeks, I have had a few people ask me why Sun didn't choose GPL v3 for Freeing the Java platform. "Does this mean you're siding with Linus?" they have asked me. "You must be," they have said, "because you chose 'GPL v2 only' rather than 'GPLv2 or any later version' as the license for the Java platform, preventing automatic use of GPL v3. You must be critical of it."
Those conclusions are not true at all. The answers are actually pretty straightforward, and when I discussed this matter with Richard Stallman he actually agreed we were making an acceptable choice here. I'll explain.
The GPL v3 Process
First of all, Sun has been engaged directly in the GPL v3 process since it started. My colleagues and I attended the launch conference in Cambridge, MA at the start of 2006 - I even logged the conversation with my friend and collaborator Danese Cooper of Intel. Since then, Sun has been a regular participant in discussion committee B and we continue to take a close and positive interest in the proceedings. Sun's lawyers provide assistance to Eben Moglen and other SFLC staff (who have reciprocated by providing valued input and advice to Sun's open source efforts), and we intend to stay engaged right to the conclusion of the project. I even spoke on a panel supporting it at FISL in Brazil.
My personal view is that the GPL v3 process has been extraordinary and effective so far in taking a somewhat partisan initial draft and evolving it into a solid license. The first draft of GPL v3 was a work of extreme skill, but some of the concepts and language definitely needed work. There were several places where the language was that of intent rather than of effect, and no-one doubted that revision was needed - that rapidly became evident in the comments posted to the web site as well as in the discussion committees.
With more effort and erudition, draft 2 was produced and it was clear we'd come a long way. Most of the language some considered extreme had been replaced by careful attempts to express effects in law, and we were on our way to a usable license. Still, it was clear there was distance left to travel. There's now a working draft in circulation just among the discussion committees.
Excellent work is taking place to understand how for example to neutralise the effect of software patents without unintended side-effects on the ability of community participants to defend themselves from hostile outsiders. There will be more drafts, more comments and I am personally very confident that an effective license will emerge from the end of the process next spring.
Why GPL v2 Only?
Actually, the very first question Richard asked me about OpenJDK was "GPL v2 or later" or "GPL v2 only"? I explained that Sun could not in good faith commit to using a license sight-unseen for such an important code-base. It's used on 4 billion devices, there are more than 5 million developers dependent on it for their living, and the risk - however slight - that the GPL v3 might prove harmful to them can't be taken. So while we are very positive about the GPL v3, committing to using it when it's not finished does not seem responsible stewardship. I hope we can use it, but I can't express that hope by committing in advance. So for now, the Java platform will be licensed under just the GPL v2.
Why Not GPL v3 Now?
The reason we did not choose to use the GPL v3 for the Java platform yet is because the GPL v3 is not ready to be used. Maybe we could have delayed the Freeing of the Java platform until the new license was ready, but we felt that was too long to wait. One strong reason was it was clear to us that migrating the Java SE code into the OpenJDK community with its new version control system was going to take a considerable time. It has to be moved from the internal, closed version control system we've used historically over to the new, open source VCS (Mercurial) that we'll be using both for the Java platform and for OpenSolaris. That's going to take some time - moving 6 million lines of code along with their audit trail with confidence is a job you can't rush. So we decided not to wait for the GPL v3 process to complete.
Why not LGPL?
Well, we preferred to follow the lead of the existing GPL Java community by using the GPL with an exception rather than using LGPL. This is actually the approach that the GPL v3 design is following. rather than having custom licenses for each purpose, the GPL v3 is designed to be used optionally with exception language that modifies its effect but remains compatible. This clever approach is how GPL v3 will hopefully be able to bridge between various other Free and Open Source projects that use different licenses.
So will you use GPL v3?
See above! We obviously can't commit to that yet - the license isn't finished. However, as things stand I would be very surprised if the final GPL v3 was not an effective tool for some of the communities Sun sustains or will initiate in the future. We are certainly not opposed to it, and it would be a huge mistake to read our use of the GPL v2 that way. Any change to the licensing of OpenJDK would naturally be made with the same caution and attention to compatibility and the affected ecosystems as characterised our previous decision.
I am frankly amazed by the criticisms some have levelled at the GPL v3 process. They seem to ignore the incredible and positive way it is evolving and just find fault with things that are already the subject of work by the diverse participants on the discussion committees and the web site. We're discussing license activation, software patents, managing DRM and all the other things that are supposedly wrong. If the critics were to step inside the process rather than throw rocks from the outside they would discover that. If Sun can participate, for goodness sake, who could possibly feel excluded?
Posted by webmink
( Nov 30 2006, 12:38:20 PM PST )
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Comments [8]
links for 2006-11-30
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Pretty good summary by Tony. I actually would like more people to use CDDL, especially if they migrate away from vanity licenses. However, I am not out to evangelise it; I just want to stop MPL-originated proliferation.
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If you wonder why I am grumpy and slow to respond, it's because my DSL is down and Pipex can't say any more about when it will be fixed than "maybe six working days".
Posted by webmink
( Nov 30 2006, 04:21:58 AM PST )
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Wednesday November 29, 2006 First Time in Second Life
The reactions to Sun's announcements about the Java platform moving to GPL produced a deep amazement in many people. A crowd had gathered waiting for the news, and there were definitely critics waiting to find fault. When we actually announced the news, it turned out we had gone further than anyone expected.
In fact, apart from the odd voice of self-interest (from what others call "strip miners"), the only serious criticism was over holding one of the events on the announcement day as a "virtual" Q & A in Second Life. ZDNet newbie Larry Dignan was pretty harsh, for example. To be honest, if that's all people can find to criticise them I'm pretty happy!
Having said that, and being like Tim a teachable sceptic of the value of Second Life, I actually thought it was a pretty good thing to do. Despite what this comedy writer said:
Sun, of all companies, recently hosted a Java developer Q&A in Second Life. No Web cast, no conference calls, no live forum. If you wanted to participate, you had to become a Second Life resident.(and Larry implied), there was plenty of opportunity for engagement. We briefed press all over the world, provided a press release translated to local language, had press at the launch event, held an IRC chat which was so heavily attended it was almost unmanageable, wrote blogs and responded to comments - and so on. The Second Life event was an experiment, and just one part of the overall picture.
Moving on from the ephemeral and the complaints of those outraged by the new, was the content any good? Well, I didn't find the immersive environment added anything much to the experience, but the content was actually very good indeed. Floyd has a good summary of what went on and you can listen to the audio recording too. True, it was amusing to see the penguin cruising around the auditorium, and guessing which avatar was which person was fun too, but the questions were good and so - even though I say so myself - were the answers. If that's the quality we'll get every time I want more, break-dancers or not..
Overall, I think this was a good thing to do. I think we'll see more use of immersive collaboration spaces to augment more traditional communications, so this was an interesting experience. It got plenty of coverage and brought the OpenJDK news to more people than would have heard otherwise. And best of all, despite all the straight-laced tut-tutting, it was actually pretty good fun.
Posted by webmink
( Nov 29 2006, 10:01:14 AM PST )
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links for 2006-11-29
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I'll be speaking in London to members of the British Computer Society Open Source Specialist Group.
Posted by webmink
( Nov 29 2006, 04:29:18 AM PST )
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Tuesday November 28, 2006 Planet Collision
No-one harmed. Actually, the result looks pretty good - OpenSolaris has a new Planet. Great work by Glynn Foster and others. And thanks for the cool Hackergotchi, Glynn!
Posted by webmink
( Nov 28 2006, 07:44:51 PM PST )
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Monday November 27, 2006 links for 2006-11-27
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Uber-cool tool for Mac users - turns Flickr and Google Images into a source for slideshows.
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Perfect timing here - the Java platform just became even more perfect for use as the default programming environment for Gnome, and now Andrew has a first glimpse of the new bindings. Even better, KDE is interested. Exciting times.
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Now would be a great time to go to theyworkforyou.com and write asking your MP to sign this EDM.
Posted by webmink
( Nov 27 2006, 04:23:43 AM PST )
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Saturday November 25, 2006 links for 2006-11-25
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I was reminded of this article I wrote in January by the fact that MSN Music purchases are now effectively killed by Microsoft's new direction in DRM with the Zune. Reading my list of DRM failure points it seems rather prophetic.
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I'm still not quite brave enough to issue an invitation like this to join in with OpenSolaris, but Mark Knows No Fear.
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Just take a look at the comments flowing from this thing. Seems Novell have certainly managed to hit a nerve.
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Hugh has a coupon for Thresher (UK wine store) offering 40% off any wine between November 30 and December 12. It's a test of how effective word-of-mouth can be. I'm in!
Posted by webmink
( Nov 25 2006, 04:25:21 AM PST )
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Friday November 24, 2006 IT Guy on YouTube
Early on at Sun I noticed that there were plenty of people around who liked less-than-serious videos. I just found my favourite to date up on YouTube, along with three others I'd not seen before (of varying funniness), all under the title "The IT Guy". Give these a try:
- Episode 1: "Good Enough" is still Good ... Right? ("Xeon Roasted")
- Episode 2: More Is More ("Ice Station Xeon")
- Episode 3: More Is Never Enough ("Ginormabytes")
- Episode 4: Out Of The Box ("Xeon Sauna")
Seems someone has decided uploads are good - there are a whole load of more serious videos from Sun up there.
Posted by webmink
( Nov 24 2006, 11:51:59 PM PST )
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links for 2006-11-24
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Loads of positive comments from a wide range of people, and a couple of anonymous negatives just for balance.
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FOSS.IN is shaping up to be an amazing event - great quality and diversity of speakers. And I'm thrilled to say that Sun is the principle sponsor.
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Many congratulations to Jeff and Pia on getting this off the ground - wishing them every success (and looking forward to Open CeBIT in Australia!)
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Here's what their commitment to "interoperability" really means - stubborn wilfulness and 11th-hour letter-only-compliance. "At this point, some of the major commercial businesses which needed the documents have exited the market"
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IBM appeared in the press release and now defends the Novell sell-out, even while Novell appear to be distancing themselves from it.
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First port for the Java ME code Sun just released under the GPL.
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Roy is a friend we met at University many years ago. While the scale has changed, the man hasn't!
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For those who thought my job title was outrageous, here's one that goes further.
Posted by webmink
( Nov 24 2006, 04:18:56 AM PST )
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Thursday November 23, 2006 Thanks
Today is pretty quiet for me here in the UK, and I am thankful that the US is celebrating Thanksgiving. I spent a couple of days in Milan at the start of the week where I gave a talk at the new Open Source Business Academy event that was held there. I was able to include an open source status slide for Sun's Java implementations for the first time - something I am especially thankful for!
If one could earn US citizenship by collecting US stamps in one's passport I would almost certainly have done so by now, so it's in order to thank a few people (nowhere near everybody I should, I have so many people to thank) in connection with the Free Java platform progress we've made! I'd like to recognise the huge help that Geir, Dalibor and Mark generously gave and continue to give me over OpenJDK and much else. A huge thank-you to my excellent and wonderful team, the best I've worked with in a decade. And warm, loving gratitude to my family for putting up with the time away that was necessary over the last two months.
Posted by webmink
( Nov 23 2006, 05:39:17 AM PST )
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links for 2006-11-23
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An article from me explaining why open source matters to enterprises
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I missed this when the Seattle PI first published it - it tells how Microsoft evades Washington state taxes and asks about the ethics of philanthropy while taking fiduciary duty to the extreme of tax avoidance like this.
Posted by webmink
( Nov 23 2006, 04:20:07 AM PST )
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Tuesday November 21, 2006 Simple Is Better
In a fine article yesterday whose title I have appropriated for this posting, Frank Hayes exactly captures the thoughts I was thinking as we were going through the license selection discussion for the Java platform inside Sun. I don't agree with his comments on obsolescence, but when it comes to licensing:
Anyone knowing that history would have expected Sun to open-source Java on Sun’s own terms ... Amazingly, Sun didn’t do any of that. The Java open-source license is identical to the Linux license. No specialized terms. No strings. Nothing new. Sun actually did keep it simple.
Licensing simplicity was one of the goals of the Open Source Initiative. By having licenses pre-approved as "freedom promoting" by a group of experts, the plan was to save developers from having to make decisions about which licenses were OK and which were a problem. I regard it as a huge irony that this approach was so successful that the number of approved licenses has proliferated to the point where one needs legal advice to choose between them. So one of the very first things we did when I became Sun's Chief Open Source Officer in 2005 was to start the process of simplifying Sun's approach to licensing by retiring an old open source license, SISSL, which I assume no responsible company will now choose to use.
Following the OSI's lead, the time has come to further simplify, and I'm pleased to be able to announce that Sun has contacted OSI again and informed them that another license Sun created - the Sun Public License, or SPL - is no longer required by Sun and requested that they consider it "retired". We migrated the last large codebase from it last spring - NetBeans - and it's now a historical artefact.
It was a good thing in its day, but it was one of many licenses created from the Mozilla license out of necessity and now we have CDDL it's not needed - that license has provided the whole community with a long-term alternative to "vanity" licenses. I'd encourage the (many) other creators of Mozilla-derived licenses to take the same step. We owe it to our colleagues in the open source community to keep things simple.
Posted by webmink
( Nov 21 2006, 03:49:00 AM PST )
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Monday November 20, 2006 Software Never Has Bugs
Have you ever watched one of those sci-fi or war films where there's an alien/enemy take-over of the ship/base and the captain heroically manages to get to the box on the wall, open the cover and hit the big red switch which blows the whole thing to kingdom come just in the nick of time? (Bond, anyone?) Have you had the same thought as me? That building that sort of capability in to your infrastructure is just an invitation for some system defect to accidentally blow the whole place sky high accidentally?
Well, it really happened - just down the road from us in Portsmouth there was huge disruption recently as second world war bombs were removed from a naval base. The benefits of having planted the bombs in the first place were undoubtedly huge in the minds of the military men who planted them, but the unexpected side effects were very disruptive.
This was brought to mind reading MJF's piece on the kill-switch in the new MS Office product, and then Tim's reaction to how it might be subverted. I'm sure it makes sense in someone's mind somewhere, but this customer-hating paranoia at Microsoft is eventually going to really hurt someone (unless, of course, their software never has bugs).
What with the "Windows Genuine Adware" stuff waiting to turn off your system at the slightest whim, the question of why anyone would knowingly install software that includes an intentional self-destruct like this is high in my mind - especially as viable alternatives become more and more common, as this BBC story almost gets round to saying explicitly. ZDNet newbie Larry Dignan may be able to stay neutral-voiced, but I just have to shout that it's a calculated abuse of a dominant market position.
Putting a "kill switch" that can be locally and remotely triggered depends on the fact that Software Never Has Bugs. Yeah, right.
Posted by webmink
( Nov 20 2006, 03:10:37 PM PST )
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links for 2006-11-20
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"...the fact that Sun has now provided open source licensing ... around this rich platform for creating operating system independent applications offers a stark contrast to the recent actions of Novell with respect to Mono."
Posted by webmink
( Nov 20 2006, 04:21:31 AM PST )
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