On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 02:23:30AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> wrote:
> > I'm amazed at the level of intolerence that's greeting a pretty major
> > contribution to the free software community. There are, what, five major
> > OS/kernels for PCs/workstatsions these days -- Windows, OS X, Solaris,
> > BSD and Linux. How does it make any sense at all to be hostile to the
> > fact that now four out of those five are free at their core?
> I would love a viable Debian-based Solaris system, and I think it's
> absolutely wonderful that we have so much software available under free
> licenses. But the CDDL/GPL issue is a big one,
For those playing along at home, the CDDL isn't GPL compatible, and
OpenSolaris's libc is CDDL'ed -- so anything GPLed can't link to libc
since that would violate 3(a) [0]. The reason GPL'ed software is okay
for regular Solaris is the "major components" exception, but that only
applies if those components don't "accompan[y] the executable".
So there're three fairly simple ways around that issue:
(a) go the www.sunfreeware.com route, and have a separate repository
for GPLed stuff. This has arguably worked for Debian in the past,
with Qt distributed on the main site, and KDE distributed
externally. It's not very good though.
(b) get the OpenSolaris libc relicensed to something GPL compatible;
this might be plausible depending on whether the rationale for the
CDDL ("initially we will not be able to release the source
for all of Solaris") applies to the libc code or not; it's
possible that it doesn't. Debian's obviously had success with
this in the past.
(c) get glibc working on OpenSolaris, and make it fairly easy to
choose whether to build with OpenSolaris's libc or GNU's libc,
eg by having "sol-gcc" build with the former and "gcc" with the
latter. Debian already supports multiple libc's (cf, dietlibc),
so this oughtn't to be very challenging, at least after any work
to get glibc working on OpenSolaris.
Heck, as far as (a) goes, if Nexenta wanted to setup a minimal
distribution of just the kernel and libs, without all the l33t GNU stuff
that'd probably allow Debian to distribute the rest of it. The caveat to
doing that for regular Solaris or Windows is the "We will never make the
system require the use of a non-free component", which wouldn't apply
in this case.
The issue's not really that difficult -- its like has been solved before
repeatedly -- and making it into a bigger issue than it is doesn't
really help anyone. For comparison, the GNOME Project launched in August
'97, noting problems with the KDE/Qt mix [1], it then took Debian 'til
September '98 to get serious about pulling it [2], which then happened
a month later [3].
Cheers,
aj
[0] Presuming the FSF's claims about dynamic linking hold up in this
case, anyway.
[1] http://lwn.net/2001/0816/a/gnome.php3
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1998/09/msg00285.html
[3] http://www.debian.org/News/1998/19981008
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