inamerrata

Just prior to the “State of the Coffee Cup” talk on Sunday, Tom Marble sent a quick invitation to Steve Langasek, Sam Hocevar and myself to have a chat with Simon Phipps about the CDDL and some of the concerns that have been raised on the debian-legal list lately — particularly about choice of venue. Unfortunately in the ten or fifteen minutes between the mail and the meeting, we couldn’t find Sam, but we managed to grab Don Armstrong to join in instead.

It’s a couple of days later, and I’m going from memory, not notes, so this is paraphrasing. Simon’s primary concern was one of predictability — Debian accepted the Mozilla Public License back when it was released (and prior to Mozilla and other software tending to get dual licensed under the GPLv2) which is what the CDDL was based on and contains almost the exact same terms. Simon’s comment was that if you’ve accepted that then, reviewing new licenses from scratch and coming up with different results really makes it hard to work with you, and worse makes it look like you’re basing your conclusions more on who proposed the license rather than what the license actually says.

Don and Steve seemed to mostly appreciate that point, but still thought that choice of venue was harmful and unnecessary, and that it’d be nice if Sun — as pretty much the primary organisation currently behind any of these licenses — would take some steps to reduce that harm: limiting choice of venue to when both parties in a dispute are multinational, for example. Simon’s concern there was that updating the CDDL would require a lot of effort internally — getting buy in from all the groups in Sun using the CDDL, as well as getting the wording changes approved from the appropriate legal advisors, and convincing the lawyers of Sun’s commercial partners that the changes weren’t going to be a problem later; and committing to all that work when a new versions of the GPL is about to be released and it might be a better thing to work on getting the relevant software available under that, or even the GPLv2. On the other hand, Simon thought that making (binding) statements about Sun’s interpretation of the license seemed to (eventually) work reasonably well for the DLJ, so might be something that can be done again for this issue. And while that only counts for Sun, we can fairly easily ask if other authors of CDDLed stuff agree with Sun’s interpretation for their software, and only worry about possible problems if it turns out they don’t.

That’s pretty much where we ended up I think, with Simon suggesting that we work out what exactly needs to be clarified with Tom, and then get it passed back up to Simon to get signed-off on. And hopefully that’s what’ll happen over the next little while. :)

(The somewhat more interesting question of whether we can combine CDDL’ed OpenSolaris (in particular Solaris libc) with GPLed userspace tools such as dpkg to produce a Debian OpenSolaris distro is still up in the air — Sam’s currently waiting on a response from the FSF legal team on one of the questions that concerns Debian, aiui; but they’re currently flat out working on GPLv3 as you might imagine. Oh well — in the meantime, there’s always Nexenta!)