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Leaping the chasm from proprietary to open: A survivor's guide

Bryan Cantrill · 14.5K views · 2015-08-18 · 43:28

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Overview

Bryan Cantrill's OSCON 2015 talk on moving a proprietary product to open source, drawing on Sun's history with Solaris and illumos, licensing choices and the relicensing after Oracle's acquisition.

On Hacker News

HN commenters cite it for the history of open source at Sun and Oracle, and for Cantrill's explanation of licensing choices.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2020–2024

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znpy · 2020-08 · Strong recommendation

There's a very interesting talk on the matter by Bryan Cantrill where he explained that the gpl was unsuitable for their scope for a number of valid reasons, including the fact that the gpl vitality would have affected indipendent hardware vendors too, iirc. And some more cases. I hope I didn't write bs, however here is the talk of you want to know more and with more details: [VIDEO] (leaping the chasm from proprietary to open: a survivor's guide) As usual Bryan Cantrill is just brilliant at explaining stuff. Edit: just to be explicit: it was NOT about keeping stuff out of Linux.

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lloydde · 2024-01 · Reference

MPL 2.0 has been the preferred license for CTO Bryan Cantrill and crew for more than a decade: “And because any conversation about open source has to address licensing at some point or another, let’s get that out of the way: we opted for the Mozilla Public License 2.0. While relatively new, there is a lot to like about this license: its file-based copyleft allows it to be proprietary-friendly while also forcing certain kinds of derived work to be contributed back; its explicit patent license discourages litigation, offering some measure of troll protection; its explicit warranting of original work obviates the need for a contributor license agreement (we’re not so into CLAs); and (best of all, in my opinion), it has been explicitly designed to co-exist with other open source licenses in larger derived works. Mozilla did terrific work on MPL 2.0, and we hope to see it adopted by other companies that share our thinking around open source!” [LINK] Also discussed around 38 minute of [VIDEO] Although not explicitly stated there are like deeper roots here “The one important exception to these generalizations is Sun Microsystems' CDDL, which was a true improvement on MPL 1.1, and which continues to cover a substantial amount of important open source software. … I encourage Oracle, the current CDDL steward, to consider relicensing its CDDL code under MPL 2.0, which is as worthy a successor to CDDL 1.0 as it is to MPL 1.1.” from Richard Fontana’s article at the time of the MPL 2.0 rel

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bcantrill · 2023-10 · Reference

Unsurprisingly -- and as happens almost reflexively on any HN post involving Oracle -- my talk from LISA 2011[0] has already been cited here. I expanded on that in my OSCON 2015 talk[1], to which I would add this: thinking about Oracle as "evil" is really the wrong way of thinking about them; to think of them as diabolical is to infuse the place with a kind of humanity (if crooked) that it doesn't necessarily contain. Oracle is soulless, which may or may not be worse than other companies, but it is decidedly different: however deluded they might be, Meta thinks that they are making the world a better place; Oracle not only doesn't harbor any such delusions, they are further genuinely confused why anyone would care about a higher purpose or calling. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]

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Video by Bryan Cantrill, played through YouTube.

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