Open Source Initiative ratifies Sun's CDDL Licence

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 20 Jan 2005 at 11:17

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has formally ratified Sun's Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) as an open source-compliant licence.

It is widely expected that Sun will use the licence to distribute an open-source version of its Solaris 10 operating system, although the company has not yet confirmed it will use the CDDL for this.

Sun first submitted its draft for the CDDL in December, following the launch of Solaris 10. The OSI recommended it receive approval early in January, and it is now a formal part of the open source canon of licences.

The CDDL is loosely based on the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL) and like the MPL includes a 'patent peace'. Any patents included in software licensed under the CDDL must be licensed for free use in so far as they are used within that software.

One source told a news site that the terms of the CDDL is tantamount to Sun donating all of its patent portfolio to the open source community, putting IBM's contribution of 500 in to perspective.

However, the difference appears to be that patents in CDDL software are licensed to a degree - the degree necessary to build, sell and use the software, but no further. IBM has actually donated its 500 patents, with much broader rights.

This is in line with the companies' respective perspectives on open source and Linux. Sun's approach at least erects some boundaries to stifle its IP being dumped into Linux, while hopefully allowing enough freedom to work with its software to encourage a community of developers to form around it.

IBM is simply showing its support of Linux and open source. As its latest results show, it is benefitting from pushing Linux as a platform in sales of its middleware products - which aren't open source - that run on top.

Indeed in the original draft, Claire Giordano, of Sun's CDDL team, said that as the CDDL was based on the MPL, it was expected that software released under the CDDL licence would not be compatible with software released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) such as the Linux kernel.

Furthermore, the CDDL stipulates that where CDDL software is used in other software, the resultant software would have to meet the terms of the CDDL.

However Sun licenses Solaris and its goal has to be to create a thriving community of developers to push the platform forward. While the MPL upon which the CDDL is based is hugely popular, as evidenced by Mozilla's Firefox browser, there's no guarantee that the same support will sprout for Solaris. And the Netscape code from which Mozilla and then Firefox sprung took quite some time to gather any momentum at all. Add to that Sun's previous PR fireworks over open source-ing Java and there are some in the open source community that are, at the very least, sceptical about Sun's approach - not least Linus Torvals himself. The Linux head honcho has said in an interview recently that what Sun is offering to the open source community is a 'crippled' version of Solaris, hobbled in the same way the company has insisted on keeping a tight grip on the reins of Java: that it wants the all the benefits of the open source process without ceding any control over what emerges at the other end as a product.

On the other side is the fact that Solaris contains an awful lot of Unix intellectual property, property that a company called SCO is spending an swful lot of money on in court with IBM, claiming IBM siphoned Unix code into Linux via its own AIX Unix platform. The company has only said so far that while Sun has some of the widest rights to use Unix it wouldn't support the wholesale dumping of Solaris into the open source community.