[advocacy-discuss] "What is OpenSolaris" page

[Alan Coopersmith]

Rich Teer wrote:
> One assigns certain rights to
> Sun when one contributes code to OpenSolaris: I wonder if those rights
> include the ability to relicense said code?  

Absolutely - that's one of the biggest reasons for any project to have
copyright assignments, so that if a license change is needed, whether
it's CDDL 1.0 -> 1.1, GPLv2 -> v3, BSD-with-advertising to
BSD-without-advertising, or even, for some completely unknown project,
CDDL -> GPL, that once the community decides, only one entity has to
do the formal relicensing.    Just look at how hard Mozilla had to
work to track down their copyright-holding contributors when they wanted
to go from MPL alone to tri-licensed MPL/GPLv2/LGPLv2.   (We're facing
this in X.Org too, even with just the MIT license everywhere, because
there are so many variants of the MIT license with slightly different
wording in each and many with the copyright holder's name embedded in
the license text instead of generic terms like "copyright holder" - we'd
like to simplify down to one version for all, but it's going to be hard.)

The current form of the Sun contributor agreement explicitly spells out
Sun's promise to you to always keep the code available under some
form of OSI or FSF approved license, but not which exact one it will be.

As for the hints about GPL'ing ZFS, the press reports are all we have to
go on right now.  The OGB has not been approached to discuss the issue - it
could be just more press noise as has happened a couple of times before
around OpenSolaris, as I'm sure you well remember.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering