Linux Performance Analysis and Tools

At this point in the history of the CDDL, it's very much open to question what anyone's motives were at the time it was written. It is likely that the various parties involved - even within Sun - had varying motives: Sun, like any other large organization, was not monolithic in its opinions nor even its behavior.

Whatever the CDDL was designed or hoped to do, the ultimate question of what it /will/ do may someday be decided by a court. In the meantime, Oracle - which is notoriously well-equipped with lawyers - apparently believes that the CDDL-vs-GPL question does not prevent it from porting DTrace to Linux. If someone disagrees with them strongly enough to… well, do what, exactly? …that will be entertaining.

In the meantime, why does anyone bother to argue about whether Danese wrote the CDDL, didn't write it, knew what Sun was really after in writing it, or tap-danced naked down Sandhill Road while writing it?DTrace is coming to Linux, CDDL or no CDDL. That ought to be cause for rejoicing, not flogging the dead license horse.

>I doubt anything new is going to be found by continuing these discussions.

Agreed, and just to make something clear, me believing that Sun did indeed create CDDL to be incompatible with GPLv2 is not something I hold against Sun at all, contrary I think it was the 'right' thing to do given their circumstances as a company, had I been a shareholder I would have been angry if they gave away technology 'crown jewels' to their main competitor.

On the other hand, wearing my Linux user hat I really want to have this great technology at my disposal :) (something which is now thankfully being rectified by things like DTrace / ZFS on Linux)

Anyway, as I said, this is what I 'believe', it doesn't mean it is the _truth_, I've just yet to come across anything factual which would make me think otherwise.

  You are the one denying the words of Danese while offering nothing whatsoever to support your claims.

Oh really? How about this:

  Nonetheless she is wrong to characterise the opinion of
  the Solaris engineering team in the way she does. She is
  speaking this way because she lost an argument inside
  Sun, not because her view is representative of the views
  of Sun or its staff in the way she claims. She, along
  with many actual engineers, was an advocate of using GPL
  for OpenSolaris but the need to release rather than wait
  for one of {GPL v3, Mozilla license revision, encumbrance
  removal} meant that this was not possible. I am still
  furious with her for the statement she made at DebConf,
  which was spiteful and an obstacle to a united FOSS
  movement.

  S.  (Simon Phipps)

From:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110605051830/http://www.opensol...

  If anything comes across as a 'fairy tale', it's the idea
  that Sun would allow Linux to incorporate Sun's technical
  advantages at a point where they were losing to Linux in
  the marketplace.

As one of the first contributors to the OpenSolaris project who had many long and heart-felt discussions with various Solaris engineering and executives, I believe your assertions are flat out wrong. Jonathan Schwartz (CEO at the time) was fond of saying "A rising tide lifts all boats"

http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2006/11/13/a-rising-t...

Others have pointed out that this is demonstrably false as well. Have you also forgotten when Apple was considering integrating ZFS into OS X?

Your argument also seems specious given that the only "OS" that had issues with integrating DTrace or other CDDL-licensed technology was Linux. Apple and many others have had no problem integrating it. So if Sun was really not willing to give up their competitive advantage, why would they give away technology under a license that was reasonable for almost every competitor?

As others have also pointed out, not everyone believes that the CDDL and GPL are as incompatible as many would like to claim.

It's just like the silliness you see in the Linux kernel today where some kernel symbols are marked with a special macro EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL?

http://lwn.net/Articles/154602/

If the GPL was strictly incompatible in all cases, then why is the extra silliness needed?