14 DAY TRIAL // The comments Linus Tovarlds made on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) regarding Sun's recent movements related to contributing to the open source development stirred Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, who has quickly replied on his blog.
In Linus' opinion, and not only, Sun does not intend to make major open source releases. They would rather release some uninteresting parts, under any other license than GPLv2 in order to get a good name among the open source community and to attract more talented developers to work for them. As Linus wrote:
"Ergo: they sure as hell don't want to help Linux. Which is fine. Competition is good.So they want to use Linux resources (_especially_ drivers), but they do *not* want to give anything back (especially ZFS, which seems to be one of their very very few bright spots).hey not only drool after our drivers, they drool after all the _people_ who write drivers. They'd love to get kernel developers from Linux, they see that we have a huge amount of really talented people. So they want to talk things up, and the more "open source" they can position themselves, the better.".
He also spoke about the bad aspects the GPLv3 license brings, allowing companies like Sun to keep Linux developers access away from their really interesting parts, but provides them the possibility of taking Linux parts for granted. However, Linus also mentioned Sun's Java release under GPLSv2, which, according to him, is a thing they should be commended for. He noted though that the respective release took a bit too long. You can read Linus' entire mail here.
Jonathan Schwartz felt he had to contradict some of Linus' positions regarding Sun. Therefore he made a post on his blog where he explained the reasons why their open sourcing takes so long, and also the grounds for their preference for the GPLv3 license. He wrote:
"Linus, First, I'm glad you give credit to Sun for the contributions we've made to the open source world, and Linux specifically - we take the commitment seriously. It's why we freed OpenOffice, elements of Gnome, Mozilla, delivered Java, and a long list of other contributions that show up in almost every distro ... Now despite what you suggest, we love where the FSF's GPL3 is headed. For a variety of mechanical reasons, GPL2 is harder for us with OpenSolaris - but not impossible, or even out of the question. This has nothing to do with being afraid of the community (if it was, we wouldn't be so interested in seeing ZFS everywhere, including Linux, with full patent indemnity).".
Schwartz expressed his sincere intentions of making a good job by working together with Linus and the open source community and he invited Linus over his house for dinner.