Sun joins open-source-hating corporate club

~=gr3p=~ · 04-11-2005, 08:12 AM

Su[nx]

Quote:

Sun Microsystems president Jonathan Schwartz last week justified the company's controversial open-source strategy with an attack on the GPL (GNU General Public Licence), which he characterised as a tool allowing United States businesses to pillage developing countries of their intellectual property.

The attack represents a new tactic for Sun, which is trying to attract interest in its OpenSolaris project and fend off criticism of its decision to keep Java under proprietary lock and key. While the company hopes to create an image of itself as an open-source leader - and to reap the development work of the open-source developer community - Schwartz's speech to the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco last week was reminiscent of Microsoft's anti-GPL rhetoric.

The speech came on the heels of Sun's announcement of the five members of its OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board, intended to help develop and guide a developer community around the open-source version of Sun's flagship Solaris operating system. The board includes Roy Fielding, the co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation - the Apache Web server is one of the more visible open-source successes. The board also includes two outside Solaris developers and two members from Sun.

Like Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who once compared the GPL to Pac-Man, and president Steve Ballmer, who famously called the GPL a "cancer" feeding off of intellectual property, Schwartz believes the licence goes too far. On top of the danger to respectable business practices, he argued the GPL is "IP colonialism", a threat to poorer countries who need to use intellectual property to compete in the world marketplace.

Source :http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/...fm?NewsID=3459

redhatrosh · 04-11-2005, 08:23 AM

Is this bad or good? I cannot decide....

Open Office.org office suite.... JAVA compiler for download free...(hopefully that wud exist even after this....)...

jlliagre · 04-11-2005, 12:37 PM

Quote:

Sun joins open-source-hating corporate club

GPL is just one of the open source existing licensing model.

Disagreeing with this particular license doesn't mean "hating" open-source.

I don't underestimate the Gnu contribution to OpenSource, but forget neither that many popular and respectful OSS are not based on the GPL, including *BSD, X11, apache/tomcat, OpenOffice, NetBeans, mozilla/firefox/thunderbird, perl, eclipse, to name a few. Sun is actively contributing to many of these projects (outside eclipse obviously).

Not to mention the soon to be available OpenSolaris, would a company hating open source would release millions of lines of its code, while granting more rights to the public than the GPL does (i.e. you are free to mix your proprietary code and resell the whole without being forced to disclose your own work).

Finally, even Sun's JVM implementation is going to be "more" open (but not OSI compliant) with the new JIUL license.