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Re: [ProgSoc] GPL & CDDL



On Tue, 2007-11-13 at 10:35 +0800, Roland Turner wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-11-11 at 12:30 +1100, Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale wrote:
> 
> > As other people have pointed out, you can have any number of  
> > unrestrictive licenses, but only one restrictive one in an ecosystem  
> > if you want everything to work together.
> 
> It occurs to me that this line of reasoning merely perpetuates the
> error; there is no problem with inter-license compatibility, even for
> restrictive licenses, but the license options need to be enumerated,
> which was exactly the solution to the Mozilla licensing problem (and
> exactly what was wrong with "Eureka Squared"; it made the "two options
> are better than one, so an unbounded number of options is better still"
> error).

GPLv3 does attempt to do exactly this with sections 7 (general
additional terms) and 13 (permission to combine with Affero GPL). It may
be possible to modify the CDDL so that a clause allowing combining with
GPL code would make sense, but I haven't thought about it in detail.

The GPLv3 with Affero case highlights another issue - it's not just
about licenses, it's about the DFSG as well. The Affero GPL doesn't meet
the DFSG, so your GPLv3/Affero application will end up in non-free. The
Apple Public Source License (which Apple no longer uses) was
OSI-approved, but also considered non-free by Debian, and was part of
the motivation behind Avahi. And if a theoretical new CDDL version with
GPL compatibility was released, I don't know if updating OpenSolaris to
a new version of the CDDL requires OGB approval or if it's automatic.

James Andrewartha

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