Howdy Savio. Thanks for the discussion. I agree with you: competition is good. Just to add to the confusion, I responded to some of the Sun employee comments here:

http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/amanda/2008/02/17/hey-jonathan-the-l-in-lamp-is-literal/#comment-275

Sun isn't a fair OSS player. All of it's so-called "OSS" licenses are tailored to benefit them and not any community they're supposed to serve. It's a one-way street.

So long as we have real OSS projects, and especially Free Software that is GPLed that can accomplish the task that I'm looking to handle, I'll never support Sun or any other falsely-labeled masquerading license or the company behind it.

"All of it's so-called "OSS" licenses are tailored to benefit them and not any community they're supposed to serve. It's a one-way street."

Does sun not use the common GPL at least for Java?

@Hong Kong, yes, Sun uses the GPL for most of its OSS software.

I *assume* that Anonymouse is referring to Sun requesting contributors assign joint copyrights to contributed code. It should be noted that this is a common practice in many OSS projects.

Hi Savio,

Copyright assignment is common yes, but there is a big difference between http://www.eclipse.org/legal/committer_process/EclipseIndividualCommitterAgreementFinal.pdf
and http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/sca.pdf
The key language is "a Delaware not-for-profit corporation" and "the intellectual property
rights you grant to us (Sun Microsystems, Inc.)". There is evan a big difference between the SCA and the MySQL contributor agreement: "In return you receive back a broad license to re-use and distribute your contribution. ... You also may select two of the following items: a MySQL Press book, a MySQL shirt, a US $100 rebate to a conference or training class, or a US $100 donation to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) by MySQL AB."

Note also that while Sun has talked about relicensing OpenSolaris GPLv3, it remains under the CDDL.

Emily

I am a Sun employee and have been using Linux on my laptop for the last 8yrs, all described here: http://blogs.sun.com/ValdisFilks/entry/it_is_simple_linux_is we always talk about the differences between Linux and Unix, but Linux is Unix and Unix is Linux. It is no more difficult to go from AIX to Solaris as it is from Linux to Solaris, I worked with HP-UX and Solaris and then found no trouble with Linux, except drivers. We always talk about the many Linuxes/Unixes, but that is true, there are many distros but only Red Hat and Ubuntu are popular, Red Hat taking up the largest proportion of the market. No disrespect to Mandrake, Suse etc, I have gone through many of them, but they seem to dissappear or wane. To get my Nvidia card and wireles to work I want a Unix (Linux) that will have good and long support.

So the competition is really between Solaris and Red Hat, not Linux vs Unix.

This is all good, remember the market and some large computer companies said a long time ago that Unix will die, Sun always backed Unix through the tough times and I hope will in the Future. But it is not Unix vs Linux it is Red Hat vs Solaris.

Sun uses the GPL (and the Mozilla, and the BSD), and yes its a for profit corporation.

Just like SugarCRM, Alfresco, Mulesource, Red Hat, Novell, MySQL - and thousands of others. All of whom have contributor's agreements.

And oh wait, I just recognized INFOWORLD has a contributor's agreement, below, and I have to click it? It, too, is an evil for profit corporation!

I'm moving to Cuba. I hear they really understand free software.

Sun vs Linux..... vs OS X vs Windows vs BSD vs LINUX! all great. Competition raises the game as already stated. I use Linux to program for Sun platforms and other *nix. File systems are a little different but other than that you are dealing with the same beast. I love Linux but I think OSS has a long way to go yet (lots of unfinished, unpolished products) and too many are treating it like a religion. Why should everything to do with *nix be OSS?

I can't see why a persons choice of operating system seems to suddenly determine said persons choice of software. Turboprint is a godsend for many of us Linux users but it is mainly proprietary and costs money. The developers probably can't make enough money on support with a product like this and they still need to be paid like any of us.

As for the comment above, I'm afraid without Sun's input and support (even just the financial bit) the OSS scene would look a little more bleak than it does at the moment.