Bryan Cantrill
1 HN recommender · recommended in 6 months, 2020–2024
43:28 · 14K views · Aug 18, 2015
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.
HN commenters cite it for the history of open source at Sun and Oracle, and for Cantrill's explanation of licensing choices.
6 comments from Hacker News
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: this 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.
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 this 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
It's hard to know -- but something that definitely struck me was that we at Sun did much better technical work in the bust (2001-2005) than the boom (1997-2001). (It's hard to say anything definitive about this as there is so much there that's specific to Sun and the group of technologists I was working with, but it certainly didn't make me long for the boom!) As for the progression of software development, this may be trite to say, but in my opinion the single most important revolution in software is the rise of open source. I don't think that there was a single event here per se but rather a multi-decade long progression across many different domains that has changed just about every single aspect of software development. (Cloud computing too, certainly -- but I don't think that cloud computing is economically viable without open source.) So software development from the 1990s is unrecognizable in large part because it is just so damned proprietary -- which, as it turns out, was in fact a relatively short blip in the fullness of history.[0] [0] this video , in which I expand a bit on the history of open source, among other things
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] this video
So, that rant actually predates Oracle v. Google. (For a bit of a history of my LISA talk that you quoted, and then my added color on Oracle v. Google see [0].) Oracle has shown everyone over and over again who they are; it shows how deep the mistrust in Red Hat has become that Oracle seems benign by comparison. [0] this video