Honestly just use ZFS. We've wasted enough effort over obscure licensing minutia.
Which was precisely Sun/Oracle's goal when they released ZFS under the purposefully GPL incompatible CDDL. Sun was hoping to make OpenSolaris the next Linux whilst ensuring that no code from OpenSolaris could be moved back to linux. I can't think of another plausible reason why they would write a new open source license for their open source operating system and making such a license incompatible with the GPL.
Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL. That was one of the design points of the CDDL. I was in that room, Bryan and you were not, but I know its fun to re-write history to suit your current politics. I pleaded with Sun to use a BSD family license or the GPL itself and they would consider neither because that would have allowed D-Trace to end up in Linux. You can claim otherwise all you want...this was the truth in 2005.
The whole open-source steer by SUN was a very disingenous strategy, forced by the changed landscape in order to try and salvage some parvence of relevance. Most people saw right through it, which is why SUN ended up as it did shortly thereafter: broke, acquired, and dismantled.
For (the lack of) openness, I agree, but the claim that they were not innovative needs stronger evidence.
(In many ways, it still is a time of pirates, we just moved a bit higher in the stack...)
I wouldn't say McNealy was that different than any of those, though others like Joy and Bechtolsheim had a more salutary influence. To the extent that there was any overall difference, it seemed small. Working on protocol interop with DEC products and Sun products was no different at all. Sun went less-commodity with SPARC and SBus, they got in bed with AT&T to make their version of UNIX seem more standard than competitors' even though it was more "unique" in many ways, there were the licensing games, etc. Better than Oracle, yeah, but I wouldn't go too much further than that.
> Simon Phipps (Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at the time), who had introduced Cooper as "the one who actually wrote the CDDL",[19] did not immediately comment, but later in the same video, he says, referring back to the license issue, "I actually disagree with Danese to some degree",[20] while describing the strong preference among the engineers who wrote the code for a BSD-like license, which was in conflict with Sun's preference for something copyleft, and that waiting for legal clearance to release some parts of the code under the then unreleased GNU GPL v3 would have taken several years, and would probably also have involved mass resignations from engineers (unhappy with either the delay, the GPL, or both—this is not clear from the video). Later, in September 2006, Phipps rejected Cooper's assertion in even stronger terms.[21]
So of the available licenses at the time, Engineering wanted BSD and Legal wanted GPLv3, so the compromise was CDDL.
Some people argue that Sun (or the Sun engineer) as creator of the license made the CDDL intentionally GPL incompatible.[13] According to Danese Cooper one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible.[18]
Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part
of the design when they released OpenSolaris. ... the engineers who wrote Solaris
... had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that.Edit: Nevermind, debunked by Bryan Cantrill. It was to allow for proprietary drivers.
> Simon Phipps (Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at the time), who had introduced Cooper as "the one who actually wrote the CDDL",[19] did not immediately comment, but later in the same video, he says, referring back to the license issue, "I actually disagree with Danese to some degree",[20] while describing the strong preference among the engineers who wrote the code for a BSD-like license, which was in conflict with Sun's preference for something copyleft, and that waiting for legal clearance to release some parts of the code under the then unreleased GNU GPL v3 would have taken several years, and would probably also have involved mass resignations from engineers (unhappy with either the delay, the GPL, or both—this is not clear from the video). Later, in September 2006, Phipps rejected Cooper's assertion in even stronger terms.[21]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distrib...
So of the available licenses at the time, Engineering wanted BSD and Legal wanted (to wait for) GPLv3, so the compromise was CDDL.
> Simon Phipps (Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at the time), who had introduced Cooper as "the one who actually wrote the CDDL",[19] did not immediately comment, but later in the same video, he says, referring back to the license issue, "I actually disagree with Danese to some degree",[20] while describing the strong preference among the engineers who wrote the code for a BSD-like license, which was in conflict with Sun's preference for something copyleft, and that waiting for legal clearance to release some parts of the code under the then unreleased GNU GPL v3 would have taken several years, and would probably also have involved mass resignations from engineers (unhappy with either the delay, the GPL, or both—this is not clear from the video). Later, in September 2006, Phipps rejected Cooper's assertion in even stronger terms.[21]
So of the available licenses at the time, Engineering wanted BSD and Legal wanted GPLv3, so the compromise was CDDL.
I am willing to bet that Google had the same thought. And I am also willing to bet that Google is regretting that thought now.
That last one is likely to get some kind of hacky workaround. But nobody wants to do the invasive changes necessary for actual BPR to enable that entire list.