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Comment by ilikejam | Hacker News Reader

There were genuine reasons for the CDDL - it wasn't an anti-gpl thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=youtu.be...

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Danese Cooper, one of the people at Sun who helped create the CDDL, responded in the comment section of that very video:

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.

I stand corrected!

Yeah, it's hard to understand this without context. Sun saw D-Trace and ZFS as the differentiators of Solaris from Linux, a massive competitive advantage that they simply could not (and would not) relinquish. Opensourcing was a tactical move, they were not going to give away their crown jewels with it.

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.

This needs to be more widely known. Sun was never as open or innovative as its engineer/advertisers claim, and the revisionism is irksome. I saw what they had copied from earlier competitors like Apollo and then claimed as their own ideas. I saw the protocol fingerprinting their clients used to make non-Sun servers appear slower than they really were. They did some really good things, and they did some really awful things, but to hear proponents talk it was all sunshine and roses except for a few misguided execs. Nope. It was all up and down the organization.

> Sun was never as open or innovative as its engineer/advertisers claim, and the revisionism is irksome.

For (the lack of) openness, I agree, but the claim that they were not innovative needs stronger evidence.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying they weren't innovative. I'm saying they weren't as innovative as they claim. Apollo, Masscomp, Pyramid, Sequent, Encore, Stellar, Ardent, Elxsi, Cydrome, and others were also innovating plenty during Sun's heyday, as were DEC and even HP. To hear ex-Sun engimarketers talk, you'd think they were the only ones. Reality is that they were in the mix. Their fleetingly greater success had more to do with making some smart (or lucky?) strategic choices than with any overall level of innovation or quality, and mistaking one for the other is a large part of why that success didn't last.

Java was pretty innovative. The worlds most advanced virtual machine, a JIT that often outperforms C in long running server scenarios, and the foundation of probably 95% of enterprise software.

ANDF had already done (or at least tried to do) the "write once, run anywhere" thing. The JVM followed in the footsteps of similar longstanding efforts at UCSD, IBM and elsewhere. There was some innovation, but "world's most advanced virtual machine" took thousands of people (many of them not at Sun) decades to achieve. Sun's contribution was primarily in popularizing these ideas. Technically, it was just one more step on an established path.

Sure plenty of the ideas in Java were invented before, standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. The JIT came from Self, the Object system from Smalltalk, but Java was the first implementation that put all those together into a coherent platform.

The thing is - it was a time of pirates. In an environment defined by the ruthlessness of characters like Gates, Jobs, and Ellison, they were among the best-behaved of the bunch. Hence the reputation for being nice: they were markedly nicer than the hive of scum and villainy that the sector was at the time. And they did some interesting things that arguably changed the landscape (Java etc), even if they failed to fully capitalize on them.

(In many ways, it still is a time of pirates, we just moved a bit higher in the stack...)

> In an environment ... they were among the best-behaved

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.

And Cooper's boss:

> 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.

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