Hannu’s Blog

Why is this subject so difficult? I started writing this blog entry about a month ago but I’m still here. Somehow everything I have written so far doesn’t make any sense when I look it next day.
Ok. We have made the decision to open source OSS and the announcement will be made on June 14th 2007. The announcement was supposed to be kept secret but we realized that members of the open source communities may want to give some feedback before the announcement. So the secret was leaked which proved to be the right solution.

The original idea was to release OSS under CDDL for Solaris/OpenSolaris and GPLv2 for the others. However as we expected the BSD communities didn’t like this so they will get OSS under CDDL too (how much I hate these silly open source license wars).

In addition we will announce our intention to move further development of Open Sound System to a community.

The license is really GPLv2 instead of LGPL or the Linux kernel license. This may look stupid but actually it’s not. The beauty of GPLv2 is that the license permits use of OSS only with operating systems and applications that are also released under GPL.
In this way the source code is available under GPL for everybody. Organizations and users using GPLed applications under GPLed operating systems (kernels) can use GPLed OSS for free. Just the companies and organizations using OSS in non-GPL compatible environments are required to buy the commercial license.

Some open source operating systems like OpenSolaris and the BSD variants are not compatible with GPL. We will make OSS available also under the CDDL license for these operating systems. CDDL makes things more complicated than with GPLv2 alone. However I think the benefits will be greater than the possible problems.

I think this licensing policy is good for everybody. The open source community will now have access to the source code after 10 years of closed source period. Users of closed source applications and operating systems can still use OSS and it’s source code if they purchase the commercial license. We as the initial developer of the software will still have some chances to continue development of OSS as professional developers. More details about the licensing will be published after the official announcement.

Why do we do this?

First of all we have recognized the benefits of open sourcing to the user and software developer communities. We also believe that with the help of the developer community we can make OSS better than it’s now.

Another reason is that our potential customers currently expect to have access to the source code.