[osol-discuss] Recent putback of PSARC 2006/356 Reliable Datagram Sockets

[Bonnie Corwin]

Cyril Plisko wrote:
> Hi !
> 
> On Dec 20 the putback for
> PSARC 2006/356 Reliable Datagram Sockets
> 6433451 Solaris support for Reliable Datagram Sockets over Infiniband
> - RDS (2006/356)
> went into the ON. Among other things there were afew files carried over 
> from
> OpenIB project. For example :
> 
> usr/src/uts/common/io/ib/clients/rds/rdsib_buf.c
> 
>   26  * Copyright (c) 2005 SilverStorm Technologies, Inc. All rights 
> reserved.
>   27  *
>   28  * This software is available to you under a choice of one of two
>   29  * licenses.  You may choose to be licensed under the terms of the GNU
>   30  * General Public License (GPL) Version 2, available from the file
>   31  * COPYING in the main directory of this source tree, or the
>   32  * OpenIB.org BSD license below:
> 
> [BSD license text yanked]
> 
>   57 /*
>   58  * Sun elects to include this software in Sun product
>   59  * under the OpenIB BSD license.
> 
> 
> That last sentence sounds a bit odd to me. While only Sun gets
> to decide what to include in Sun product, we are talking about
> OpenSolaris here. And it is not a Sun decision what license to
> choose. In this specific case I am sure the choice of license is
> obviously correct. In general, however, comments like that should
> not, IMHO, appear in the OpenSolaris code base.
> It is to be decided by community/CAB/OGB what license to
> use in OpenSolaris code base.
> 
> So is it a sign of Sun isn't taking it [OpenSolaris] seriously, or
> a trivial ignorance of most of the Sun' developers ?
> 

I think this is a sign of Sun internal processes becoming transparent 
and of Sun developers having to serve two masters as we continue the 
transition to open development.

When a Sun developer wants to use third-party open source, he/she must 
get approval to do so.  That approval includes choosing a license when 
the third-party source is dual-licensed.

That's what happened here.  Third-party code was brought inside Sun and 
the engineering team followed the approval process.  Part of that 
process included choosing to use it with the OpenIB license.

There is a 'license.txt' file that includes the OpenIB license text; it 
will be putback shortly.  It was inadvertently not included in the 
putback.  And files licensed using an existing license should not have 
the CDDL added to them; third-party licenses pass through as-is.  That 
will also be cleaned up.

Regarding the general question of the OGB taking on decisions about 
license choice in similar situations, I believe there will need to be 
discussions about that as well as other related topics as part of fully 
implementing detailed development processes moving forward.

Bonnie