It's been an interesting week for us amateur Sun Kremlinologists, watching the stream of "stuff" coming from the Sun analyst summit, and the brouhaha surrounding GPLv3-ing OpenSolaris.

There are a couple of interesting bits in Ed Burnette's blog on ZDNet. First, of course Sun's reasons for embracing the GPL aren't "as pure as you think". Sun is a publicly-traded company, is allegedly ;) run for profit, and Jonathan Schwartz is a smart guy - there is an agenda, and it serves Sun's business interests. This is normal and expected. It's hard to imagine why anyone would ever think otherwise.

Ed gets to the heart of the matter :

The ultimate goal is nothing short of replacing GNU/Linux with "GNU/Solaris".

Ya think? :) This has been my theory for a while. But I think Ed misses an important point in the next paragraph. It wasn't "suspicion" that kept the "thought leaders" away from OpenSolaris. I think it was two things - first, the license was declared to be incompatible with the GPL by the FSF. Second, the OpenSolaris project doesn't have it's own distro. You can choose one of two quasi-open source distros from Sun (Solaris Express, Solaris Express Community Edition), and elsewhere there are other variants, such as BeleniX, marTux, NexentaOS and SchilliX. This is all well and good, but I think that given how closely Sun is holding onto OpenSolaris, they'd be well served with an open source distro maintained by the OpenSolaris community.

As I said before, I think that it's a reasonable strategy to move OpenSolaris to GPLv3 to try to take advantage of the rift that may happen if the Linux kernel stays on GPLv2, and let "Solaris/GNU" take on "Linux/GNU" on a level license playingfield. However, I think that Jonathan's and Rich's attempt to get this to happen backfired this week, and it will be interesting to see what happens going forward.

There's one more thing that deserves a comment. In the next paragraph, Ed says something that I think needs to be clarified :

By contrast, Sun's decision to release Java under the GPL (v2) was warmly received, except for those parties such as IBM and the Apache Foundation who would have preferred a more permissive license such as ASF (Apache), EPL (Eclipse), or BSD.

The Apache Software Foundation made no statements regarding the license Sun chose for their implementation of Java SE. The ASF has it's own open source Java SE project, Apache Harmony, that predates Sun's announcement of OpenJDK by a year, and will probably be 3 years old before Sun actually gets OpenJDK operationally off the ground. But the ASF doesn't really care what license people use for their own intellectual property. Now, it would have been nice if Sun chose a license that wasn't known to be incompatible with the Apache License that we use in Harmony (FD, I'm the PMC Chair of Harmony), but it was their choice to make, and they made it. Having another open/free Java implementation is good. Period.