[LUAU] further thoughts on Sun using the GPL for Java

[Jim Thompson]

Getting Richard Stallman (rms) and James Gosling (jlg) together under  
the same roof must have been quite difficult.  For those of you  
unfamiliar, Gosling's emacs (gosmacs) was originally to be the basis  
for GNU emacs.   A very bloody fight broke out, with the result that  
GNU emacs suffered a re-start, and for a long time was well-behind  
"gosmacs" in terms of its technology.

April 12, 1983: jlg announces that Gosmacs was sold to Unipress
April 19, 1983 rms responds: http://groups.google.com/group/net.emacs/ 
browse_thread/thread/95581d210c20bf8d
April 25, 1983 jlg responds to rms: http://groups.google.com/group/ 
net.emacs/browse_thread/thread/ 
a586cacf4d568074/7df0cb0022822f77#7df0cb0022822f77
April 28, 1983: Unipress raises the price of emacs to $1k for  
binaries, and $7k for source code.
January 5, 1984: rms quits his job at the AI lab to focus on Free  
Software, begins work on a compiler
September, 1984: rms puts the compiler down and starts work on GNU emacs
March 20 1985:  first release of GNU emacs, contains gosmacs code,  
which is the very incident that forces the GPL into existence.
July 15, 1985: GNU emacs 16.56 released, gosmacs code expunged due to  
request from Unipress

Gosling went on to work at Sun, where he invented first the NeWS  
window system (superior to X by any measure except market share),  
then a language called Oak, which became "Java".   Stallman, well,  
Richard is still with the FSF, but you knew that.

More links and pull quotes here:
http://www.smallworks.com/archives/00000379.htm

The point is, these two got off on the wrong foot, and pretty-well  
stayed there.  Putting them together in the same conference room for  
several days while they worked out using the "Classpath exception" to  
the GPL for use directly on the GPLed Java code, was the work of a  
master negotiator.

The back-room money says that the deal to GPL Java came about as a  
response to Novell's Mono project, an "open source" clone of  
Microsoft's .Net platform combined with the week-old Microsoft-Novell  
deal that makes heavy reference to patent licensing.  Any patents  
that cover .Net are likely to have significant prior art in Java,  
if .Net does have patents that Java can't defeat, then IBM, with its  
massive patent portfolio, is waiting in the wings, and now has what  
its wanted for years, a Java free of Sun's direct control, though not  
in the way that IBM might have preferred.  <http://news.com.com/ 
2061-10795_3-6134853.html>  The GPL effectively prevents IBM (or  
anyone else) from hijacking Java.

Yesterday jschwartz was apparently kidding with Rich Green when he  
deliberately (he started 3 times) floated a balloon that Solaris  
could be released under the GPL.   But which version of the GPL?

Adding credence to this we find this nugget burried in the "Open- 
source Java" FAQ: http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/ 
faq.jsp#g24

Q:
What about GPL v3? Have you considered using that license?
A:
While Sun has been working with the Free Software Foundation as an  
active participant in the development and review of the GPL v3  
license, this license is not yet complete. It is Sun's strong desire  
to complete the open sourcing of its Java technology implementations  
in a timely manner, so we made the decision to use an existing,  
established license paradigm rather than wait for GPL v3 to be  
completed. Using GPL v2 does not indicate anything negative about GPL  
v3. Sun continues to be very actively and positively involved in this  
new license's development.

Now why the hell would they do that?

So here's the question, "Is Solaris going to be the original GPLv3  
*nix platform?"

Here is another, "What are the chances that Ubuntu would offer a  
version of their distro with a GPL-ed Solaris kernel underneath?"   
Sun would continue to sell support and services for the traditional  
Solaris kernel+userland, while Ubuntu offers the Solaris kernel  
(complete with a GNU/linux userland) or the linux kernel, both  
supported, on Sun (and other) hardware.


I suspect that might win a tide of developers.

its not linux, but...