Re: Bug#40937: omniorb: Freeness?
othman@cs.wustl.edu writes:
> Efforts are underway to try convince Sun to remove the problem clause
> in their licensing terms.
Which is laudable, but the odds are not good.
We've seen various versions of these clauses in every Sun license that
has been mentioned on the list since it was created. Sun seems
consciously intent to build some kind of business model on owning
interfaces rather than owning code. They invariably draft up their
licenses in ways that serve to protect their control of the interfaces.
The Sun vs Microsoft suit over Java (which seems to have slipped out
of media coverage - did it end yet? and how?) is also an example. We
all hailed Sun because we like to see Microsoft get down, but in
reality Sun seems to be acting just as shrewd as Microsoft. The
implicit premise of the suit was that *someone* was going to control
Java, either Sun with their lawyers or Microsoft with their brute
market force.
This is strange because Sun *use* to be the good guys. They embrace
unix. They usually sound nice when speaking about the hacker
community. They invent cool things. But it is becoming apparent
that, in doing all of this, they are trying to install themselves
as the benevolent king of the computing avantgarde. We'll have
a enlightened monarchy but still a monarchy.
Sun seems to be spewing out cool software concepts and the code to
support them. They encourage everybody to build on them and extend
them and pay nice lip service to open systems, free software and
whatever other buzzwords they can find. But the reality is that all
the code comes with these interface clauses: Sun is *not* giving
us the freedom to hack away on the interfaces and experiment with
making them a little better than Sun's way of doing it.
The common reaction to the interface clauses seem to be "ah, but they
mean well. They're just protecting their open standards from being
grapped by evil forces". Your enemy's enemy is, however, not always
your friend. And we should be careful about accepting, mentally,
those Sun licenses as "essentially free except that a few inessential
legal quirks need to be straightened out".
mv $USER ../; cd ..; rmdir soapbox
--
Henning Makholm
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