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

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 7:09 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 12:18:45PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
>> 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.
>
> There's just no way that there were, as you claimed, programmers who were
> willing to quit if it was BSD.  BSD was fine, there are other good choices
> but BSD was fine.  What the video showed is there were programmers who were
> willing to quit if was the GPL, which is the opposite of what you have so
> stridently claimed.
>
>> 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.
>
> That makes sense to me, the GPL was hated inside of Sun, it was considered
> a virus.  The idea that you used a tiny bit of GPLed code and then everything
> else is GPLed was viewed as highway robbery.

Not to get in the middle of this, but I've know several Sun Kernel
engineers personally over the years (mostly in the 1990's when this is
relevant). The overwhelming majority view is what Larry has said.
Granted, these were engineers that were at the Sun office in
Broomfield Colorado for the most part, but I think they were
representative. I've also talked with several people in senior
management at Sun who helped make sure that things got released under
CDDL and they've told me they'd rather have gone with BSD, but it had
issues the CDDL addressed.

So can we please just get on with things and stop this silly back and forth.

Warner