Sun's Schwartz Attacks GPL

jskelly writes "Sun Micro President Jonathan Schwartz attacked the GPL at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco yesterday.Other than the same old arguments (you can't make it proprietary later) he adds that it imposes on developing nations "a rather predatory obligation to disgorge all their IP back to the wealthiest nation in the world" -- but fails to mention that the converse is also true: the wealthiest nation in the world is similarly, under the GPL, forced to "disgorge all its IP back to the developing nations" as well. Duh!"

Re:Nothing wrong with hating the GPL...

[n0-0p]

You're kidding right? The MPL tri-license includes the MPL, GPL, and LGPL. All of the Mozilla apps are distributed this way; the MPL portion allows for certain proprietary binary components like the talkback debugger and installer in the binary only distributions. The CDDL is *similar* to the MPL portion, but is not compatible with either the GPL or LGPL so it lacks that whole tri-license aspect.
Nice to hear you're happy with OpenSolaris, but please stop spreading mis-information

It's on purpose !!

[lazy_arabica]

But Schwartz said that some people he's spoken to dislike [the GPL] because it precludes them from using open-source software as a foundation for proprietary projects.

Guess what ? It's exactly its goal. For people who don't care about freedom, of course, it's a strong diasdvantage ; but they're missing the whole point of Free Software.

Release src only if publically release binary

[Anonymous Coward]

ATTENTION

GPL allows one to keep everything private one does for self/company/corporation. It's spelled out in the license. You need only release any source you have done IF you publically release the binary. We use lots of heavily modified GPL in house, but of course we could never give out our hard work for free, to anyone. It would be corporate suicide if we did that. I know we aren't the only large software company doing that. We don't, of course, ever use source code in publically released software, but we do when for nearly all private, multi-$000 sales.

Re:High cost to Depevoling Countries

[Spectra72]

But to the point of this article, the GPL is NOT the only Open Source license out there. This is the point that many people miss. BSD, Apache, Mozilla/Firefox...are the GPL zealots ignoring these hugely important pieces of software when they rant?

Just because JS is poking at various points of the GPL, doesn't me he is poking at Open Source.

Re:Ha!

[ShieldW0lf]

I think he's referring to the fact that the US was pretty much the number one copyright offender in the world when they got started. The British were flipping and the Americans just flipped them off. It was only when the US started having significant developments of their own that they started to care about "IP"

Re:Release src only if publically release binary

[GigsVT]

but we do when for nearly all private, multi-$000 sales.

Then you are violating the GPL. You can't sell it without distributing it, unless you have them using it on your servers somehow and never sent them any binaries. (i.e. the whole dot-bomb application service provider business model)

Re:GPL is not always appropriate for all uses

[sjames]

The GPL has been labelled as a "viral license" in some company policies I've seen because it really does open everything up in most cases.

It's important to understand the implications of ANY licence. They're all viral. A proprietary library will also cause problems if it infects your application. It might limit your licencing options, or it might drive the price of your software too high for it to be viable.

I worked with a company once that had a real business need to give out driver source. The driver itself was just an enabler, not their profit center (the hardware itself was the profit center). Unfortunatly for them, the driver for the PCI glue chip they used carried a proprietary licence on it so that they were forced to buy a source licence for each customer they wanted to sell to. The cost of curing the proprietary infection was a hardware redesign.

Re:Nothing wrong with hating the GPL...

[Anonymous Coward]

I must have missed something. You're saying you've switched to OpenSolaris, but you want to spend money on modifying it without giving it away?

Now, I may have missed something, but I'm pretty sure the OpenSolaris license is one of these "Sun can do anything they like with any code, even stuff other people wrote, everyone else who wants to play either has to get Sun to give them a special license or has to distribute it for free."

What you actually wanted was a BSD distribution.

And, FWIW, if a product is entirely yours, you don't have to distribute it for free. You only have to do this if you incorporate work done by other people licensed under the GPL. That's only fair right?

Re:I don't see how that's possible

[srleffler]

The fact that the sale is 'private' isn't the point. The issue is that you're only obligated to give the source to the people to whom you give/sell binaries. If you give the binaries to five customers, you have to release the source to those five customers. If you release the binaries to whoever wants them, you have to do likewise with the source. Simple.

As others have pointed out, the customers receiving the binaries and source are free to redistribute them, and probably cannot be constrained from doing so by any non-disclosure agreement..

Re:Slashdot editors attack Sun!

[jskelly]

If you read Mr Schwartz' weblog entry from Monday [sun.com] he goes into more detail about this (I'm sorry I didn't find that earlier, to also link it in my submission). In his blog, he calls the GPL a form of "IP colonialism" -- that sounds a lot more like an attack than a benign observation.

Weirdly, the CDDL that Schwartz (in the ZDNet article as well as the blog) says he prefers over GPL endorses the
requirement that source of modifications be made available [sun.com]. It seems to differ mainly in someone else's ability to later
"distribute executables under a different license." So, oddly, it seems that the CDDL he advocates would also force the poor, unwashed "developing nations" to "disgorge the source code of their IP" back to "the community" where someone else (like Sun) could incorporate those, and release the application as a binary under a different (closed) license.

Maybe he is dreaming of the olden days, when Sun incorporated Berkeley BSD code in SunOS and closed it up. But if so, what's wrong with the BSD license? Oh -- right -- that license wouldn't require anyone to disgorge the source of their modifications.

Finally, I'm not sure what you didn't like about my counterexample. If "the wealthiest nations" hadn't already put a lot of code under GPL then "the developing nations" wouldn't be facing this so-called problem. In other words, they are already "benefiting" from GPL code before they start "suffering" from having to follow the GPL

Please stop giving credit to the wrong movement.

[jbn-o]

The ZDNet article headline reads "Sun criticizes popular open-source license". Calling the GNU General Public License an "open-source" license is ahistorical and gives credit to the wrong movement, hiding the name of the real author of the license and the name of the movement for which the license was written.

By calling the GPL an "open source" license, the open source movement is allowed to grab credit for a trivial bit of work: constructing a set of rules which allow the GPL to be given the Open Source Initiative's imprimateur. This is nothing compared to writing the GPL and starting the free software movement.

The GPL was written many years before the OSI started. Nobody who would form the OSI wrote the GPL. The GPL was written by the FSF (most notably, RMS, who gets far too little credit for his work here on Slashdot). The OSI has dismissed software freedom [gnu.org] for a message which does not preserve user's software freedoms (for instance, the open source definition does not guarantee a user's privacy--the OSI approved the early revisions of the Apple Public Source License which required publication and notification of a central authority upon changing APSL-covered software in most instances. The FSF did not give its imprimateur to the APSL v1.x revisions, holding out until Apple changed the license in what would become the v2.x revisions.).

Let's give credit where credit is due. I think just as RMS tells us (repeatedly [gnu.org]) that GCC is a free software program, not an open source program [com.com] because it misstates the authorship and reason why the program was written (RMS was the initial author of GCC which he wrote to provide software freedom for GNU), we ought to give the author and intentions of the GPL proper mention by calling it a free software license. That cannot be done by calling it an open source license.

Re:GPL is not always appropriate for all uses

[LaCosaNostradamus]

How so? All the projects in question are free to choose other avenues than the GPL ... provided they re-write all the tons of stuff that's GPL'd in them already. But then, how much of that stuff would have been made available if the GPL wasn't there to protect the code authors to begin with?

There isn't anything negative about market share and restrictions that can be said about the GPL that cannot also be said about Sun's products. THAT is what all this bullshit PR is about. Just think how much market share Sun could have if it slashed prices ... but at the cost of a lesser profit margin. Just think how much market share completely-free software could have ... but at the cost of no protection for the code authors. On and on this goes.