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."

Fixed it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Controversial messaged published by Linus Torvalds

controversial message published by Linus Torvalds

Link to Linus' message

[morgan_greywolf]

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

License changes take a loooong time

[davecb]

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

Slashdotted. Usenet/Google mirrors

[McDutchie]

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]

Re:Linus needs to stop speaking for Linux

[fimbulvetr]

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 is right

[frogstar_robot]

There is nothing wrong with capitalism but constancy is an important element of trust. The kernel devs have been carrying on as they are now for many years and only shift slowly and openly in response to the opinions of others. You may not always agree with them but you know where you stand with them. Alas, this hasn't always been true of Sun. An infamous example was McNealy wearing a Tux suit to a trade show to show how friendly and interoperable they were going to be with Linux. A few months later he delighted in showing off the "decapitated" penguin head to his office visitors. Sun is rather infamous for how often their strategies and positions shift.

All we can say now is that Sun is more open than they have been in the past. The question is can I trust they will be so in the future. That affects whether or not I and others will do business with them which ties directly into their capitalist ambitions.

While we're on the subject, I will express appreciation for OpenOffice and other genuine contributions they've made to Open Source. Johnathon Schwartz also showed some real class in response to Ballmer's recent diarrhea of the mouth. Sun has done many laudable things, but they sometimes act in ways that make it difficult for me to know what to make of them.

Re:It's flame time

[kripkenstein]

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).

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

[GuyverDH]

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:Linux and GPL3?

[Dan Ost]

Linus doesn't own the copyright to all the code in the kernel, therefore, he can't change the license even if he wanted to.

If, down the road, the GPL3 is determined to be a good thing, then it might be worth the enormous effort required to (1) get permission the change the license from all the copyright owners we can find, (2) replace code that is owned by coders we couldn't find or wouldn't give permission, and (3) try to do all this without detracting from the real work of developing the kernel.

It's possible, but unlikely, at least in the next 10 years.

To be fair...

[Eric Damron]

"Then Schwartz responded by.... saying lots of nice things."

Schwartz said more than just some nice things. He explained that moving an existing product to the GPL is more difficult than a product that you start and just put under the GPL to begin with. The existing products can have third party code that was licensed. These parties may not want their code put under the GPL.

I can see that you would want to know where every line of code came. This could take time. If you found third party code that was licensed, you have to either remove that code and rewrite it or get the third party to buy off on GPLing their code.

Re:License changes take a loooong time

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely. But don't forget that Linus personally owns the trademark "Linux" for computer operating systems.
That could easily be worth USD 25 million. Not that he'd sell it.