Sun preparing open source developers’ bill of rights

Tom Goguen, vice president of marketing for Sun’s operating platforms group, told ComputerWire yesterday Sun partly accepted criticism that it had failed to adequately explain CDDL, and is working with its legal team to clear up some of misunderstandings.

[We will] get it from the legal people what will be a developers’ bill of rights of what they can do… their rights and obligations to the community, Goguen said.

Goguen noted Sun was unlikely to have pleased the entire community with Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), especially those who equate open source with the liberal GNU General Public License (GPL).

There’s obviously concern because it’s a new license. But there’s also a case if it wasn’t GPL we weren’t going to make them happy, Gougen said.

Goguen was speaking after legal expert Dan Ravicher penned an open letter to Sun chief executive Scott McNealy expressing serious concerns over CDDL.

Ravicher, executive director of Public Patent (PUBPAT), was troubled the language used in CDDL appeared to leave the way open for Sun to bring patent infringement claims against developers who modify code licensed by Sun under the CDDL.

Ravicher believes CDDL is simply unnecessary because open source is already governed by a plethora of licenses. How may more open source licenses do we need 300, 5,000? They are not different enough to justify a new [license] unless you want to intentionally create a new license that walls off the community, Ravicher said.

Ravicher has asked Sun to provide information concerning the legalities of its license.

Sun has based CDDL on the Mozilla Public License, which Goguen noted had to be re-written by the company because it considered the license vague on the level of protection provided to developers over in patent disputes.

Goguen called CDDL a very, very liberal license that allows developers to combine Sun’s code with other code, and to compile and re-sell Sun code without paying royalties to the company. Changes to code must be returned to the community.

Developers who adopt APIs licensed under CDDL are granted the patent rights covering the specific APIs, while individuals who attempt to prosecute developers under CDDL have their rights associate with the code terminated, Goguen said.