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by justin66 4757 days ago
> Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL.

In fairness to both sides, pretty much everything that isn't GPL can be said to be incompatible with GPL, and almost anyone who decides to use something different than the GPL can be said to be deliberately incompatible with the GPL. That's just the nature of the GPL.
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_delirium 4757 days ago
Permissive open-source licenses (MIT, BSD, etc.) are GPL-compatible. But I think the question here is more one of motivation: was a decision made for reason X which had the side-effect of making DTrace's license incompatible with Linux, or was the choice of license made specifically to cause that effect? There appear to be conflicting accounts from people who were at Sun at the time.
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justin66 4757 days ago
> Permissive open-source licenses (MIT, BSD, etc.) are GPL-compatible.

I guess I have a problem characterizing them that way since the traffic is going to be purely one-way. The GPL code can't be used by the projects with more permissive licenses without some kind of dual licensing, can it?

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_delirium 4757 days ago
It depends on what level of compatibility we're looking at. It's true that MIT-licensed code can migrate to a GPL codebase but not vice-versa. But a different kind of compatibility (what I was thinking of) is whether you can maintain separate and separately-licensed codebases and legally distribute the combined binary. If DTrace were MIT and the Linux kernel were GPL, you could legally link them and distribute the result, so in that sense they'd be "compatible". Which isn't the case if you have a CDDL and a GPL codebase.
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