Torvalds vs Schwartz GPL Wars

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."

It's flame time

There is nothing like media pitting two public figures against one another and, consequently, pitting supporters and detractors against each other, in order to generate some cheap polemic to exploit for some 15 minutes. Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:It's flame time

There is nothing like media pitting two public figures against one another and, consequently, pitting supporters and detractors against each other, in order to generate some cheap polemic to exploit for some 15 minutes.

It's called "politics".

Re:It's flame time

Good point. It's definitely interesting. I think sometimes it's good to see science and engineering as human pursuits, but even when it may look like the spittle is flying across with the packets, these are just two intelligent guys with differing points of view who would probably buy each other a beer when they're done for the day.

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

Hindsight's always perfect. Do you really expect Tanenbaum would have had any qualms about letting him fail if Linux had been a class project, with no actual real-world use? I don't think he would've just done so right away without giving Linus a chance, but it would've been mild coercion at best - the "I'm the professor, trust me, I know what's right and wrong, so why don't you change your design now, son, you'll get a better grade that way... after all, I *am* the professor, and I control your grades, if you catch my drift" kind.

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

There is nothing like media pitting two public figures against one another

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

Actually, had you bothered to read TFA, you would see that there is no flaming at all in Shwartz's post. He even invites Linus to dinner at the end. I am no fan of sun (although since GPLing Java I am starting to lean that way, I admit), but his reasoning in the post for several things (licensing choices of Solaris, relationship to Linux, etc.) makes a lot of sense.

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

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?

Actually, if anything Linux does a better job of supporting hardware for me than Windows does most of the time. Even my 'Windows Only' Wacom tablet. And I don't know when the last time you looked at linux was... but it might be worth having another look..

Schwartz should reply in a mailing list

So this could be a new historical Linus debate.

Link to Linus' message

Mirror here [iu.edu]http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0706 .1/1722.html [iu.edu]

lkml already refusing connections...

Apparently they don't feel like a /.-ing today. :-)

ahh....

"I see your shwartz is as big as mine."

Re:ahh....

I felt a disturbance in the shwartz, as if millions of nerds clicked past TFA and read the comments for these sorts of jokes.

License changes take a loooong time

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

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

This is fascinating. It seems to me through the number of references in Linus's post to ZFS that he (or at least members of the kernel team) are drooling over it. This is all actually working quite the way RMS intended. Linux may be a GPLv2 stronghold, but as soon as some piece of GPLv3 software comes along which is a *must have* i.e. ZFS, enough pressure will fall on the major copyright holders that they will consider going through the PITA of upgrading the kernel to GPLv3.

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

And to prove the sincerity of the offer, I invite you to my house for dinner. I'll cook, you bring the wine.

most.. awkward.. date.. ever.

Curse you

Excuse me while I go selectively erase the mental image of Bill Gates in a French maid uniform from my memory with the time-tested method of blunt trauma to the head.

Re:oh man

It's a trap!

Slashdotted. Usenet/Google mirrors

The LKML is mirrored into the newsgroups 'linux.kernel' and 'fa.linux.kernel', you can find the message on your friendly local newsserver as Message-ID: <[e-mail]> and Message-ID: <[e-mail]>, respectively.

Or via Google Groups:
http://groups.google.com/group/linux.kernel/msg/87 f6f676dc00c0be [google.com]
http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/msg /9dae088569c12eb4 [google.com]

Linus is right

Sun are the proverbial me-too, camp follower company.

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

The controversial summary sent by "javipas" to Slashdot was from the beginning to the end an open attack on Linus Torvalds and his "real" opinion posted to a mailing list . . .

Schwartz has the right attitude

It's working together, not working against each other. The F/OSS community is HUGE, but wasting resources is always silly. As Schwartz put it: "Let's stop wasting time recreating wheels we both need to roll forward."

Very nice attitude.

Linus needs to stop speaking for Linux

Unfortunately, due to his position, his personal opinion counts for too much. He needs to be more careful posting incendiary comments like this, because the public at large interprets his comments as the position of the rest of the Linux (and dare I say, open source) community. It does not help that his comments are so obviously not well thought out. At least think it through before inserting your foot squarely in your mouth.

Re:Linus needs to stop speaking for Linux

What exactly is not well thought out about his comments? Incendiary? Which part? All I saw was caution and some speculation, no attacking. In addition, I saw several other high visibility maintainers agree with him.

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

What exactly is not well thought out about his comments? Incendiary? Which part?

The whole thing?

first off: they may be talking a lot more than they are or ever will be doing.

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.

they sure as hell don't want to help Linux.

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.

they'll not be releasing ZFS and the other things that people are drooling about in a way that lets Linux use them on an equal footing. I can pretty much guarantee that.

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.

See the OpenSolaris stuff - instead of being blinded by the code they _did_ release under an open source license, ask yourself what they did *not* end up releasing.

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.

Yes, they finally released Java under GPLv2, and they should be commended for that. But you should also ask yourself why, and why it took so long. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that other Java implementations started being more and more relevant?

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, .NET/C#) that Sun felt they were in the clear. So they slowly released it, with a strong eye toward potential forking and incompatibilities. And to be perfectly honest, Sun never understood why the community wanted their codebase so badly. But the community pushed, and Sun eventually gave in. (Primarily due to Schwartz's leadership!)

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

People are perhaps reading to much into it. Linus advanced some scenarios, while at the same time giving his reasons. He was blunt, in his style, about some things but I don't see it as an all-out attack on Sun. Even more interesting is that he says that he could be wrong, and that he hope he is wrong, and that releasing Solaris under the GPLv3 would be a very good thing.

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

... to sell ink, photons and electrons.

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

Seems not only Linus is pissed of by Sun. The GNOME project as well:

http://www.placenet.org/benoit/index.php/post/2007 /06/13/Indiana-patches [placenet.org]
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/project-indiana.h tml [0pointer.de]

Shock new - commercial company wants profit!

Why is Linux surprised that a commercial company might be holding back on open sourcing a large amount of its intellectual property? Thats what they make money out of. So maybe some people in Sun have been talking up open source wrt to Solaris to get some publicity , so what? This is what companies do to get their product noticed and theres nothing wrong with it (unless you're some publicly funded socialist who does little work but mouths off a lot about some neverland utopian ideal, but I'll leave Stallman for another post). Coporations are what make the western economy run , without them and they're "nasty" hunger for profit we'd all be a lot worse off including all the rabid open source fanboys. Theres nothing wrong with Open Source but lets not start thinking its the solution to any sort of problem , it isn't. The world would still turn without Linux or the FSF. Yeah , mod me down fanboys, see if I care.

Not really a war

This is just Linus speaking bluntly as always. In fact its comparatively mild compared to some of the things he says. He is never afraid to call a dirt extraction device a spade.

communities what?

Companies compete, communities co-operate.

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

This is very interesting. I got some questions: 1. How can you say, that companies and communities do not compete? That is total Bullshit! Communities and Companies compete more then ever these days. The same as Bloggers compete with the old school media. There is a hell of a lot competition going on. Gnome and KDE are another wonderful example of how communities compete against each other. Ubuntu and Gentoo are another wonderful example! 2. The Old Software development and distribution models do not work anymore and Sun will find out, if they want or if they do not want. Sun needs to learn more - lots more - from the OpenSource development model if they want to prosper in the future. 3. As Linus puts it, merely trying to take away the best people from the Linux Kernel will not work. Sun needs to realize that they must organize them selfs more and more like the Kernel development model is organized. 4. OpenSource tactics can and will be implemented in the Future business world as well. 5. Linux is a 21st century role model.

Sun and Open Source

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

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.

I'm no big fan of Java, but allow me to point out that GNU's biggest contribution to the open source world is arguably GNU C and glibc, which just as much aren't designed as vehicles for publishing source (i.e. what interpreted languages, well, unlike, say, Microsoft BASIC, Perl and Python are technically bytecoded too, but humor me.) Considering the environment that Java was originally marketed for (browser apps) there are good security, portability, as well as performance reasons more relevant at the time, for making client-side browser apps pseudocompiled.

Statistical model for wars

They should apply statistical model for wars from previous story [slashdot.org] to figure out who has higher chance of winning.

Jonathan Schwartz's response

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

He sounds like any other corporate fag to me :P

"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?

Linus wrote:

So to Sun, a GPLv3-only release would actually let them look good, and still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the joys of license fragmentation).

If I'm not mistaken, Linus is saying Sun would only release code under GPL3 just to make it so Linux couldn't use it. But Linus was the one who chose *not* to release Linux under GPL3, right? Is his argument contradictory, or is it just me? I'm really not sure what he meant by that paragraph.

Unixish authors comment

So we have Schwartz, Linux and Theo on record. Now all I need for my collection is something from RMS, Bruce Perens, a couple of the FreeBSD Founders and NetBSD founders to REALLY get things going :)

Controversial ??? HOW ?

I really don't see what's so controversial about that message from Linus.

- 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

If they were really interested in seeing ZFS everywhere, why did they release it in a license incompatible with the GPL license?

Linus, please join us in the here and now....

SPARC Performance horribly slow? Have you tried a modern SPARC processor? I'm talking say an UltraSparc T1 here, not an old US II or US III processor. Performance on web based applications with the T1 cpu blows the doors off of most Linux based OSes. oh and "Linux code _is better_" - I'm sorry. Today's Solaris 10 is more stable, more capable and more compatible than any Linux variant I've ever tried. Couple this with ZFS, Fire-engine, Containers/Zones and we've got an all in one solution to consolidation that runs circles around the Linux based varieties that we've tried. (TurboLinux, RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu, Yoper, Stormix - and yes, I know some of these are no longer around). Please, please, make certain of the facts before making such patently false claims.

Re:Linus, please join us in the here and now....

Single-threaded SPARC performance on modern processors is perfectly fine. In fact it's better than on Intel / AMD in that it's always the same. ie - it runs the same speed, regardless of load.

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.)

I've had horrible experiences with RedHat in particular

Well, that's fair - so has everyone else. (Some people are simply willing to overlook them)

They aren't making Solaris look like Linux, they are however, making Solaris cross platform (Sparc/AMD/Intel)

*cough*bullshit*cough* As a newborn Sun employee, Murdock is thinking about making Solaris more Linux-like [zdnet.com]. "When people say Linux wh