Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Industry to adopt open source constitution - vnunet.com

There's some coverage on vnunet.com of the CA plan to simplify the open source licensing nightmare.

It's not clear to me how the CA plan will necessarily work. Sure, it's nice that they're thinking about something like CDDLas the foundation, but how will an infinite number of variations of the CDDL help?

The article also contains the following misleading statement:

To deal with those issues, Sun Microsystems has created the CDDL for the release of the Solaris 10 source code, and Computer Associates formed CA-TOSL when it released its Ingress database last year.

But this has led to a proliferation of open source licences and caused confusion with both end users and developers.


Let's be absolutely clear here: the CDDL and TOSL didn't create the license proliferation problem. It already existed - these new licenses didn't suddenly create a problem. The fact that new licenses needed to be created is symptomatic of the problem, and the CDDL is explicit in identifying the problem and taking steps to address it. Blaming it for being the cause simply won't wash (but then, when did shooting the messenger ever go out of fashion?).

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