Sam Varghese
Friday, 30 January 2009 04:57
Opinion and Analysis
Page 4 of 6
iTWire: Is this something that has been forced on you by the economic conditions?
SP: I'd say this is something that was a necessary next step in the growth of Sun. But I would say that it's been precipitated now because of the current economic conditions. We had the plan in track in the middle of last year. We heard from other companies such as Intel and Microsoft just today (January 23) that they were laying off.
What's happening at Sun is the working through of an announcement we made at the end of last year that was itself part of a process that started earlier on. Obviously it is the economic conditions that are involved, but it's part of a more thought-through restructuring that we're doing.
iTWire: There have been several comments from senior Linux people, including kernel developers, that the one thing that has held up adoption of OpenSolaris - which has some very good features - by people like them is the licence. Does Sun have any plans to make any changes to this (CDDL) licence?
SP: I disagree with that. One of my comments in the keynote, was how you pick licences based on the community you want to affiliate with. One of the essential parts of OpenSolaris, all along, has been to say that the OpenSolaris community is the OpenSolaris community. The Open Solaris community is not exiles from the Linux community. The Open Solaris community is not defined by some other community. It is a community in its own right.
And that community is actually is actually very attached to CDDL. Now, if in the future, there were to be any change in the licence, it would be in order to affiliate that community with some other community, rather than because there is some misfit in the licence.
At the moment, if you look at the OpenSolaris community, it's grown substantially over the last year. There are a six-figure number of participants. There are something like a hundred user groups around the world. There are substantial daily pings from computers that are using OpenSolaris, checking our respository for new builds. I'd say that it's working fine, as a community in its own right. It's not in any way hampered by CDDL.
What is hampered by CDDL, is the relationship of that community to a community that's using GPL. I quite recognise that. When the time comes for the OpenSolaris community to have a new kind of relationship with a GPL-using community, then probably there'll be some sort of change in the licence. But that time isn't yet.
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