[ug-bosug] OpenSolaris Binary Licence

[Moinak Ghosh]

bish at touchtelindia.net wrote:

>Having played with  Belenix for 4-5 days, I decided  to have a
>look at the internals of the CD. The first stop  was obviously 
>licencing.
>
>Of  the  dozen  plus  licences   placed  in  the  Belenix  CD,
>the  two  of importance  are  the  two solaris  licences,  the
>OPENSOLARIS.LICENCE and the OPENSOLARIS.BINARY.LICENCE.
>
>The OPENSOLARIS.LICENCE has no significant issues. This is the
>well  published Common  Development  and Distribution  License
>(CDDL) available  all over on  the net.  This IS quite  cool !
>Perhaps, more lax than even GPL. Hoping that my interpretation
>is correct !
>  
>
   Yes. CDDL allows you to combine CDDL-ed files with files having 
another license,
   even proprietary and create derivative binaries providing that the 
contents of the
   CDDL-ed files have not been reused in any of the non-CDDL files - 
CDDL is a file
   based license as opposed to GPL which is a project-based license.

   This allowance is necessary because Solaris has a whole bunch of 
third-party software
   that uses Solaris internal APIs and code. These will become instantly 
illegal if OpenSolaris
   were to use GPL.

>OTOH, the  binary licence  is somewhat restrictive  (e.g. "You
>may not rent, lease, lend or encumber Software" and some other
>multi-line sentences,  implicating 'conditions apply'  which I
>could not understand clearly). While I do some more 'googling'
>and 'sunning' on these issues, it would be nice if anybody can
>throw some light on the following:
>
>a) Which  all components  of Navada or  Belenix come under the 
>   OpenSolaris 'binary' licence.
>  
>
   SUN does not own full rights to some of the code in Solaris and thus 
cannot open-source
   it. Obviously replacement code needs to be written for these stuff so 
that those can be
   open-sourced. But that is the long-term work. A few of these are 
required components.
   So in the meantime to allow OpenSolaris distros to be able to build a 
bootable environment,
   these restricted components are distributed as binary-only 
components. These are only a
   few eg - Math library, a couple of other libs, a few commands, a few 
kernel modules.
   You can look at the "O/N Binary-Only Components, English" at
   http://www.genunix.org/mirror/index.html

   Some of  it is actually a bit silly. Things like "od" (Octal Dump) 
are closed source because
   they contain source code derived from Microsoft's Xenix! Now how much 
effort does it take
   to rewrite od ?  Probably the community can help out with this.

>b) Are  crucial  things like  kernel,  essential C libs,  ZFS, 
>   dtrace and other 'goodies' affected ?
>  
>
   Nope. The kernel, libc, and all the Solaris 10 new features, are 
open-source. I guess 90% of
   the core Solaris source-base in open-source and more are being added.

>c) What are  the  exact  implications of  these binary licence 
>   components within OpenSolaris/ Belinix etc ?
>  
>
   The binary components can only be used for building OpenSolaris 
distros. So I can legally
   use them in BeleniX.

   BTW I am not using the closed-source math library in BeleniX. I am 
using FreeBSD's math library,
   which I have modified and enhanced. FreeBSD's Math library was in 
fact donated by SUN back
   in 1993!

Regards,
Moinak.

>Sorry for poing such naive questions,  but genuinely, I am  a 
>0-ist on OpenSolaris and ALL such legal issues ... 
>
>Bish
>
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