> Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at the time, has stated this is not the case:
Of course he did. There's nothing to gain from admitting it. It's the sort of statement akin to 'Facebook deeply values your privacy', as in of course they're going to say that.
On the other hand, submitting the license to the OSI, but not the FSF to be consulted on compatibility before using it suggests otherwise.
Per Phipps in September 2006, a few months after DebConf (July 2006):
"""
>
> It would be a critical mistake to underestimate her knowledge on
> the CDDL
> issues.
Nonetheless she is wrong to characterise the opinion of the Solaris
engineering team in the way she does. She is speaking this way
because she lost an argument inside Sun, not because her view is
representative of the views of Sun or its staff in the way she
claims. She, along with many actual engineers, was an advocate of
using GPL for OpenSolaris but the need to release rather than wait
for one of {GPL v3, Mozilla license revision, encumbrance removal}
meant that this was not possible. I am still furious with her for the
statement she made at DebConf, which was spiteful and an obstacle to
a united FOSS movement.
"""
Cooper is, AFAICT, the only one that made the claim: was it ever corroborated by anyone else? Phipps and Cantrill dispute it: are/were there others?
Edit: it seems that not even GPLv3 (which they considered) is not compatible with GPLv2 (which Linux uses), so even if they did that it would be a problem. One main thing (IIRC) that was of concern was patent license grants.
The "she, along with many actual engineers" is referring to the desire for GPL; I do not doubt there were. The "are/were there others?" is asking for corroboration on the claim that CDDL was designed specifically to be incompatible with GPL.
The CDDL-GPL drama seems to be one of an attitude of "fuck-ZFS because fuck-Sun/Oracle and their fucking CDDL license".
The validity of the claim that the design of CDDL was 'malicious' is the thing I am skeptical about.
It may have ended up incompatible because of technical-legal reasons, but was that the intent? Cooper says yes, Phipps/Cantrill say no.
Sun did submit the license to the OSI for consultation/approval. It could very well have consulted the FSF/FSC, but they did not. This to me suggests they did not care about GPL compatibility.
Of course he did. There's nothing to gain from admitting it. It's the sort of statement akin to 'Facebook deeply values your privacy', as in of course they're going to say that.
On the other hand, submitting the license to the OSI, but not the FSF to be consulted on compatibility before using it suggests otherwise.