[TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

Joerg Schilling schily at schily.net
Thu Jan 5 21:18:45 AEST 2017


Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> FYI, I watched the video you referred to (my daughter having woken up) and
> Simon's comments seem to be in direct contradiction of your earlier
> statement. The relevant comments start at around 35:30, and he says that
> the Sun engineering community pretty clearly favored a BSD-style license.
> He mentions that trying to use the GPL would have pushed out their timeline
> by several years. The ``you do that and we quit'' comment (around the 38
> minute park) was quite clearly in response to using GPL for OpenSolaris.

This is strange, I have in mind that Simon said BSD was not wanted by the 
programmers and GPL was not practical because Sun then could not give away
binaries from Closed Source parts from other code owners that are in Sun 
Solaris but could not be in OpenSolaris.

IIRC, the only thing I did get from that video is the confirmation that Simon
was extremely unhappy with Danese claiming that Sun did like to have something 
that is deliberately incompatible to the GPL.

My discussion with Andrew Tucker resulted in getting to know that while there 
have been _some_ people inside Sun that would like to go this way, it was not 
what Sun as a whole intended.

I also remember that I got my recollection on the BSD thing from a face to face 
discssion with Simon and not from this video. So one of the statements from 
Simon may have been mistaken.

What I definitely remember from a private discussion with Simon is that Danese 
was very unhappy that Sun did not chose GPL and she did never understand why 
this was not possible for a product like Sun Solaris that should have allowed 
to be combined with closed source parts from other vendors as done before. She
left Sun soon after the CDDL was chosen and started to spread her view in a 
way that unfortunately harmed OpenSolaris.

Jörg

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