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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Obviously, yes, this is a long standing flame war. But your analogy is wrong. FreeBSD can use GPL code, legally. They just can't release the combined work under anything but the GPL, so they choose not to. The CDDL is itself a copyleft license, it's simply not possible to deliver a license to code that derives from both CDDL and GPL components.

Obviously it was better for Sun to release OpenSolaris under the CDDL than not. But it was a very poor choice, and again in my opinion a great harm to the community.

And frankly I don't see the Linux people complaining about anything. The linked article was written by a ZFS proponent...

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FreeBSD can use GPL code, legally. They just can't release the combined work under anything but the GPL, so they choose not to.

I think the distinction is academic. In practice FreeBSD can use CDDL code, but not GPL.

And frankly I don't see the Linux people complaining about anything.

Every time some piece of Sun tech comes up on a nerd site or aggregator, a licensing flamewar erupts. No matter how cool or useful that piece of tech is, some twit beats the CDDL vs GPL horse once again. Typically this argument then dominates the discussion. Sometimes it's the only comment. Every time.

It's the ultimate manifestation self-entitled bike shedding, because the doers have more interesting things to do. What I find repulsive is that the doers have made cool blue Ferraris for free, and we have giftzwergs complaining that they aren't cool red Ferraris, which is demotivating for the people creating all this. How would you feel if you created something neat, gave it away for free, and were thanked with a wall of people complaining about your choice of OSS license?

I apologize if I come off unfriendly. It's just that I'm interested in the actual tech, and this noise is really growing old.

What you're saying doesn't make any sense. The linked article wants Linux people to use ZFS instead of btrfs. How on earth is it "self-entitled bike shedding" to point out the clearly correct reason for ZFS not being in Linux?

I'm sorry you're interested in "actual tech". But in the real world stuff like the legal ability to use software sometimes gets in the way of our geeky aspirations.

This may be one of the few discussions where the licensing discussion is apropos, so consider my prior rant as something broader.

But it doesn't help when "great harm" hyperbole gets thrown around. The world has benefited from the gift, unless anyone is daft enough to argue that Illumos' existence, FreeBSD's incorporation of ZFS and DTrace, and OSX's incorporation of DTrace, are a bad thing. Hell, DTrace is even being used for PS3 game production.

> FreeBSD can use GPL code, legally. They just can't release the combined work under anything but the GPL, so they choose not to.

Linux can do the same as easily, they "just" have to relicense the kernel in BSD.

Please stop trolling.

No, no, no. This is flatly wrong (so I'll let you guess who's the one trolling). BSD doesn't need to "relicense" anything as the license to the existing code already permits combining with the GPL; a putative FreeBSD kernel with a GPL driver (i.e. a combined work) would need to be distributed under the GPL, but the rest of the code would remain unencumbered. None of the existing copyright holders would need to take any action at all, because the distribution would be within the bounds of the license they already granted.

There is simply no equivalence with the GPL vs. CDDL. Neither license permits redistribution at all when combined with the other. The only way to do this would be to, as you say, "relicense" the kernel by getting every copyright holder (there are tens of thousands by now) to redistribute their code under the CDDL.

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