Open
Source Round-Up:
Sun
Patents And Open Source Solaris
Sun has upped the ante in
the granting of patents to the Open Source community, offering
access to more than 1,600 Sun patents relating to Sun OpenSolaris
to developers under the new Common Development and Distribution
License (CDDL), alias “Cuddle.”
Please note:
because the terms of the CDDL license do not permit CDDL
code to be used in conjunction with GPL code, this means that
nothing in these patents can be used with Linux. That’s relevant because the 500 patents IBM offered to the
Open Source community recently can be used by any open source
developer for any purpose (no license restrictions).
I suspect this means we’re going to hear more about this.
At the same time, Sun has
said that it will be releasing its Solaris 10 code to Open Source
under the CDDL soon (Sun says that means second quarter and we’d
bet that means at JavaOne in June).
In any case, they are offering their DTrace program for
Solaris in the meantime. All
of this is accessible through the new www.opensolaris.org
site.
CA’s
New Open Source License
CA has kicked off an
initiative to get the big companies to agree on a single Open
Source license. (Can’t
you see a hundred lawyers in one room, all waving their own
agendas?)
This is a laudable idea.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) currently recognizes 85
licenses which is at least 80 too many from my point of view.
Just figuring out which one says what and what it means if
two different ones need to be put together is amazingly difficult.
We wish them well.
We hope they’ll tell us how they’re doing – in six
months or so.
Linux
Desktops On The Move
The latest Microsoft
Office to Linux desktop move we’ve heard about is from France,
where their national police fore is rumored to be moving to
OpenOffice. ZDNet reports that 35,000 desktops will soon make the move
and that a total of 80,000 are considering it, largely for the
multi-million dollar savings.
We’ve followed a large
number of these stories over the last two years and we find
several things interesting.
Sometimes they turn out to
be largely negotiating ploys.
In the UK, the National Health Service looked at Linux
desktops, but stayed with Microsoft Office, after negotiating a
multi-year deal, which is reputed to have saved them about 50%
over previous contracts.
Sometimes the number turns
out to be the potential, over time, in the organization, but the
number moving to Linux now or soon is much smaller.
That makes sense, of course, since in most organizations
moves take place a little (or at least less than a lot) at a time.
Often, they start with pilot projects of 1 to 5% of the
organization and move out from there.
This doesn’t mean that
Linux desktops aren’t moving ahead – we’re making
presentations this week and next about exactly that.
It does mean you should read the numbers carefully to
understand just who is doing how much when.
We’ll post more numbers – and comments – as we get
them.
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