[illumos-Developer] trouble getting SUNWspro

Joerg Schilling Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de
Wed Aug 25 11:02:39 PDT 2010


"Christopher J. Ruwe" <cjr at cruwe.de> wrote:

> I am NOT a lawyer, I have, however, graduated in Business Administration and
> have some founding in property rightss.
>
> As Mike Geerdts wrote, one difficulty lies in section 2 of the license:
>
> 2. Permitted Uses.
>
> [...]
>
> (b) reproduce and distribute the Software (and also portions of Software
> identified as Redistributable in the documentation accompanying Software),
> provided that you (i) distribute the Software or Redistributables bundled
> as part of, and for the sole purpose of running, OpenSolaris code;
>
> [...]
>
> The part relevant is, imo, 2b i: ... as part of [...] OpenSolaris code.
> According to http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/trademark_faq,
> OpenSolaris in a trademark of Sun, Inc.
>
> - From http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/trademark follows (under Names
> of the official binary and unmodified distributions), that**
>
> "Sun has named the official binary distribution OpenSolaris. If you
> redistribute this official binary distribution from the OpenSolaris Community
> without any modifications (no sub-setting, no super-setting) under a binary
> license that allows you to do so, you do not need to change the name. If you
> construct the distribution out of a different set of packages, however, you
> may not use OpenSolaris for the name of the entire distribution."
> **
> So, arguing that Illumos is a modification of OpenSolaris codebase, one may
> not use the term OpenSolaris for Illumos. Arguing further, that Illumos is
> not OpenSolaris, it is not permitted to bundle the compiler with Illumos.
> Also, the purpose of the compiler is to compile Illumos, so it's "sole
> purpose" is to run code other than OpenSolaris code, i.e., Illumos code.

Well, we as the community dod already decide that noone is allowed to name a 
distro "OpenSolaris". Sus did ignore this and I believe that this is not 
important. We still may use the name "OpenSolaris" in a descriptive way, so 
calling Illumos a OpenSolaris based code base is OK Calling distributions 
that are based on Illumos "OpenSolaris based" is also OK.

I did work on the next SchilliX distro today, so I may be too dense not to 
properly read the license text. In any case if we are allowed to redistribute 
the compiler for OpenSolaris codde, this should also apply to distros based on 
the OpenSolaris code.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
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