Sunday, September 04, 2005

Mohammed finally comes _all_ the way to the mountain

I recall being mildly annoyed upon first reading Sun's SISSL that yet-another-license had been brought into existence which didn't address any particular set of problems that hadn't already been addressed by existing, OSI-approved, licenses (the new, unaddressed problem being, of course, not-invented-at-Sun) and, worse, introduced insoluble integration problems ("you can't legally link library-x licensed under the very common Gnu LGPL with application-y licensed under vendor-sponsored-new-license-of-the-week"). The OSI has since worked out that the proliferation of approved licenses is problematic. It appears that some time ago Sun saw enough sense to dual-license OpenOffice under both SISSL and the FSF's Gnu LGPL. A couple of days ago, Sun went the next step and ceased using SISSL for OpenOffice. Well done Sun.

(via slashdot)