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Torvalds vs Schwartz GPL Wars
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jun 13, 2007 07:58 AM
from the which-one-is-han-solo dept.
from the which-one-is-han-solo dept.
javipas writes "The controversial message published by Linus Torvalds (mirrored) in the Linux Kernel Mailing List was from the beginning to the end an open attack to Sun and its Open Source strategy. Linus criticized Sun's real position on GPL, and claimed that Linux could be dangerous to Sun. Upon his words, "they may be talking a lot more [about Open Source] than they are or ever will be doing." Jonathan Schwartz's blog has been updated today with a post that is a direct response to Linus claims, but in a much more elegant and coherent way. Sun's CEO notes that "Companies compete, communities simply fracture", and tries to explain why using GPL licenses is taking so long."
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It's flame time (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.vivaoporto.com/)
Re:It's flame time (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called "politics".
Re:It's flame time (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Even Linus and Andy Tanenbaum respect each other, I think. Otherwise they wouldn't care what the hell the other thought. The verbal fencing is just nerdy snark at DEFCON 2. If you can't read "You would've failed in my class" with a chuckle, then you've been watching too much politics on TV. Linus would've wrecked the curve in Tanenbaum's class. He didn't design a monolithic kernel structure out of ignorance; he had a goal, and he thought that was the best way to go about it.
I wouldn't quite say "nothing to see here"...but there's no actual malice. These are two guys who are smarter than I am; I read what they think and why, and am smarter for it on both sides.
Re:It's flame time (Score:5, Insightful)
So without any actual proof (or even evidence) that Linus' design was solid, he certainly would've failed. And even now, I don't think that Tanenbaum admits that monolithic or hybrid kernels (because let's face it, Linux isn't 100% monolithic) are actually better; the most you'll probably get out of him is "yes, they're being used widely, and they haven't failed catastrophically, but microkernels are still be fundamentally better".
He's a zealot, basically (and I don't automatically mean in a bad way - he's just a zealot the same kind that, say, RMS is a zealot), whereas Linus is a pragmatic engineer (he sure has some strong opinions, too, but he can always back them up and he's willing to change them if presented with convincing evidence that they're wrong). That's the fundamental difference between the two, and it's also why Linus would've failed if he had been in Tanenbaum's class and if he hadn't changed his design according to Tanenbaum's wishes.
That being said, to not make this an entirely off-topic post, keep in mind that Schwartz is not an engineer, either. He wants to sell you a product - nothing more, nothing less.
Re:It's flame time (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://go.away/)
I know, this is obviously going to drive Paris back to page 7 of the tabloids. We'll just have to suffer through the 24/7 news coverage on all the cable news channels until this explosive story dies out. I feel bad for Torvalds and Schwartz for having to put up with the constant paparazzi swarming around them, but if you live so much in the public eye like them it's something you just have to deal with.
Re:It's flame time (Score:5, Informative)
(http://neolicity.blogspot.com/)
Sure, we may see a nice flamewar here on Slashdot. But Sun, for their part, are not playing into that in any way. Actually even Linus's post was fairly tame (by Linus standards at least, he mentioned that he could be wrong about some things).
Re:It's flame time (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no flaming in either post, nor really much at all in Schwartz's.
Someone on the LKML was talking about how Sun says lots of nice things about what their going to do with open source. Linus said essentially, "Looking at their history, they say lots of nice things, but only do anything substantive when it's in their self interest, as you'd expect."
Then Schwartz responded by.... saying lots of nice things.
Re:Is this going to hurt? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday April 26 2007, @02:00PM)
Schwartz should reply in a mailing list (Score:2, Funny)
(http://www.compactbyte.com/symbianbible | Last Journal: Wednesday February 28 2007, @08:31PM)
Link to Linus' message (Score:3, Informative)
(http://stylus-toolbox.sf.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 15, @11:50AM)
lkml already refusing connections... (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Friday August 18 2006, @11:17PM)
ahh.... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.everybodysucksbutme.com/)
Re:ahh.... (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday April 07 2003, @02:38PM)
License changes take a loooong time (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/author.html | Last Journal: Wednesday August 24 2005, @03:32PM)
Many moons ago, I was at Sun Opcom when they were trying to release Solaris 8 source to anyone who would sign a non-disclosure, and it was insanely hard to find the rightful owners and get permission to do so much as publish the code.
If my leaky memory is correct, a number of files had to be rewritten from scratch, just to be able to release them to an audince of friendly customers.
You can imagine how hard it is to hunt down and relicense everything as GPLv3, for either Linux or Solaris! Kudos to Scott and Jonathan for their perseverance.
--dave
Re:License changes take a loooong time (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/author.html | Last Journal: Wednesday August 24 2005, @03:32PM)
Oh, I do think Linus wants to help people, it's just that he's a very practical kind of person, and isn't motivated by the same things as either the FSF or a company. And perhaps isn't all that impressed by either (;-))
I suspect he's going to be impressed if and only if FSF release a clean GPLv3 and Sun releases an GPL'd Solaris. Those would make it far more practical for he and the Solarii to compete in the area which I consider most important: code quality.
--dave
Working the way RMS intended (Score:4, Interesting)
That may be the major reason for Linus's striking change of heart on GPLv3.
You have to wonder whether RMS talked to Sun at all about this. We do know that he has praised the company for the decision to GPL Java. If RMS wanted to strongarm Linux into a license change, what better way to do it than through ZFS?
oh man (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.doomers.org/~mewse/)
most.. awkward.. date.. ever.
Curse you (Score:5, Funny)
Re:oh man (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdotted. Usenet/Google mirrors (Score:2, Informative)
(http://www.interlingua.com/)
Or via Google Groups:
http://groups.google.com/group/linux.kernel/msg/8
http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/ms
Linus is right (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://aqpeag.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday April 21 2007, @05:39AM)
They don't firmly commit to anything, but merely spend a certain amount of time chasing whichever particular ambulance they think is hot with their customer base at a given moment. When the wind changes, they go off in a different direction.
TFS (Score:3, Insightful)
Schwartz has the right attitude (Score:3, Insightful)
Very nice attitude.
Linus needs to stop speaking for Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Linus needs to stop speaking for Linux (Score:5, Informative)
I also think it goes without saying that they speak for Linux, the kernel, when they offer their opinions. It seems like they've made good decisions up to this point, so we have no reason to not trust them. Sun has promises, but not much else outside of some garbage apps, which isn't much reason to trust them.
Re:Linus needs to stop speaking for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.intelligentblogger.com/ | Last Journal: Monday August 27, @11:47AM)
The whole thing?
This is incredibly unfair given that Sun has released OpenOffice, Java, NFS, major GNOME improvements, Solaris, SPARC, and a variety of other significant items into open source. While Sun struggled for a while before they got it right (they were hesitant to give up their favorite lawsuit club for beating Microsoft over the head), they did eventually embrace true OSS licensing.
While I understand his frustration with Sun's glacial pace, he needs to remember that Linux usage would be nowhere near where it is today if not for several key contributions by Sun.
Similarly not fair and incendiary. Yes, Sun has their own operating system. But they also sell a lot of Linux servers and even tried jumping on the distro bandwagon for a while. Again, Sun is having a lot of difficulty rationalizing the two different OSes. But that does NOT mean that they are hostile toward Linux development. Open sourcing Solaris isn't so much as an attempted coup (IMHO) as it is a rational attempt to find a middle ground between Sun's existing codebase and the Linux codebase.
I'm fairly certain that Linus will be eating those words in the future. ZFS is already under the CDDL license, which means that it can be included by distributions already. Just not folded into the core code. I'm certain that this will change with time, and that the CDDL will eventually be eschewed in favor of the GPL. Sort of like Sun's 500 licenses for Java before they finally got where they were going.
Ok.
Q: Self, what did Sun not release under OpenSolaris?
A: Oh, that's easy self. They didn't release any code encumbered by previous licensing problems and/or someone else's trade secret. These components are the reason why most companies refuse to OSS their software even after they have no use for it anymore. Sun took a different approach and cleaned the codebase before release. They had the same problem with releasing the Java2D and JavaSound implementatons under the GPL. They were unable to release these components because they were owned by Kodak and Dolby respectively.
This is just plain hubris. Anyone who has spent time in the Java community knows why Sun was so difficult about releasing control over Java: Microsoft.
Microsoft tried the whole Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish with Java. The only thing that saved it was Sun's legal department. It wasn't until MS was fully committed to their COOL project (ni,
FWIW, I've worked with Sun several times. They really do work hard to be helpful, but they are also very methodical about it. For example, when the primary maintainer of a Linux distribution and I got in an argument about whether or no
Not a bad Linus message (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/religion/)
Also of note is Theo's de Raadt message in Sun's blog: "Jonathan, I wish the above was true. 15 years ago I was the biggest Sun fan. Today I speak as the project leader for another set of open source projects -- OpenBSD and OpenSSH. OpenSSH will be better known to your audience, as it is what they use daily to connect securely to and from their Solaris (or Linux) machines. OpenSSH killed telnet and rlogin, for those who still remember those mechanisms. We give our software completely freely to the world, without even the standard encumberances people see in the GPL or CDDL. Yet when we turn around and ask Sun to give us documentation for the chips on their machines -- chips Sun themselves designed, not via contractors -- Sun drags their feet. Recently we tried to reopen these 10-year-old repeated requests, and once again nothing positive happened. You may remember, because you and David Yen were in an email conversation with us. Lots of nice open words were exchanged, but no action. However, let me give an example of the duplicity of Sun. (I wish I could use a lighter word). Two operating systems run on Sun's latest PCI-e based (smallish) Ultrasparc-III machines, the v215/v245 -- Solaris and OpenBSD. The latter system runs on those machines because the code to support the non-processor chips on the board had to be written after painstaking reverse engineering, because Sun refuses to make available documentation for how these chips are programmed. Now we will readily admit that not every programmer in the world needs to know how to program these chips. But does every programmer in the world need to know how to program every little detail on Sun's processors, in system mode? Sun gets great press out of UltraSPARC being all "open", but what use is supervisor-mode documentation when the rest of the chips that the supervisor-mode code has to communicate with are entirely undocumented??? The press does not spot this problem, but Jonathan, you should clearly understand this is a fallacy. There are two operating systems which surprisingly do not run on the Sun v215/v245 -- Linux and OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris?? Yes -- Sun isn't even open enough to give the OpenSolaris community enough documentation to support their new machines. So I think that Linus is right, and Sun has a long road ahead."
I tend to listen to Theo's opinion carefully on this subjects. I'm an "FSF fanboy" to the bone, card carrying and all, which curiously is one of the reasons I tend to view Theo's opinion on this subjects with interest, more so than Linus. When it's not a GPL vs BSD thing (which is a fait-diver discussion in my sense of priorities) the fact remains that he seems to see the problems with licencing with a greater depth and in general is more "idealistic" than "pragmatic".
What fight? Journalists exaggerate (Score:2)
(http://pages.sbcglobal.net/redelm)
Frankly, I see very little difference here. Linus says, as he always does "Show me the code!". He draws a line in the sand with ZFS. Schwartz says "we will", but note, no promises about ZFS. The most remarkable thing is that Sun is currying favor with Linus.
Move on, nothing to see here. The dogs bark, the caravan passes.
GNOME pissed of (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.placenet.org/benoit/index.php/post/200
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/project-indiana.
Shock new - commercial company wants profit! (Score:1, Troll)
Not really a war (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://www.mainecoon.plus.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday January 17 2007, @11:05AM)
communities what? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday July 23, @08:49AM)
It remains to see who participates and the nature of the co-operation. Sun contributing Java, even for cynical reasons, says more about Open Source as an evolving business model than a fracturing community.
And so what if it fractures anyway, maybe that makes software evolve in a more "natural" way.
GPLv2 vs GPLv3 - Linux and Sun (Score:1)
(http://www.ywesee.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday September 10 2003, @04:03AM)
Sun and Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
To my mind, the relationship between Sun and Open Source has always been coloured by Sun's Big Thing: Java.
As a development platform, Java only had one new thing to offer. Perl, Python, PHP, C et al. are "write once, run anywhere" languages, as long as you publish the source. Sun's contribution is a language that supports "write once, run anywhere" without publishing the source.
In other words, Sun's most interesting contribution to the software industry is a powerful (if painful to use) tool for distributing proprietary closed source applications.
I keep wondering whether they just stumbled into this or whether it was a strategic move. In either case, it's hardly a testimonial to Sun's support of Open Source.
Re:Sun and Open Source (Score:4, Insightful)
Statistical model for wars (Score:1)
Jonathan Schwartz's response (Score:1, Troll)
(http://www.newspony.com/)
He sounds like any other corporate fag to me
"Companies compete and communities simply fracture"? What is that supposed to infer? There are a ton of competing open source projects. I think Mr.Schwartz does not understand the open source community very well.
Linux and GPL3? (Score:2)
(http://unugunu.blogspot.com/)
Unixish authors comment (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Sunday August 20 2006, @09:16PM)
Controversial ??? HOW ? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.marsdude.com/)
- Sun says it'll do A
- Linus says that based on Sun history he is sceptical that they will actually do A, and thinks that they say A but will do something like it, but not completely
- Then he says he thinks Sun should be commended for the things they did.
That's not a war. That is just an opinion that isn't even remotely controversial.
And then someone replies...
ZFS everywhere? Doubtful (Score:4, Insightful)
Linus, please join us in the here and now.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Linus, please join us in the here and now.... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.hyperlogos.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 18, @08:19PM)
What? What the hell are you talking about?
"runs the same speed" regardless of "load"? Could you please use some technical terms here? x86 instructions complete in a given number of cycles (barring branch misprediction, to which SPARC is not immune) so intel/AMD chips also always run at the same speed (barring throttling.)
Well, that's fair - so has everyone else. (Some people are simply willing to overlook them)
*cough*bullshit*cough* As a newborn Sun employee, Murdock is thinking about making Solaris more Linux-like [zdnet.com]. "When people say Linux wh