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Open source and code releases

C

CefiroZ

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 17, 2004
Messages
218
Reading the latest about Oracle's plans for (Open)Solaris has left me with a question about open source licensing. Oracle has claimed that they will continue to use CDDL for all of the code already licensed under that, but from my understanding, they will only be releasing the source code (with possible omissions) sometime after the binary releases of Solaris.

For now I want to ignore whether they are allowed the omissions and I'm not terribly familiar with CDDL, so the rest of the post is not speaking to this situation in particular, it just got me thinking about the following.

When recalling the common software licenses that I've read they require source code to be made available but they do not require any time period for that release from what I can tell. So what are the legal details here? It seems I can grab something that is open source, make a bunch of changes, dump it into my project, and then promise to make the code available "sometime soon." What are the limits of this continuing claim before I can be forced to release the code?
 
No you cannot say "sometime soon" if you copied someone else's copyrighted code under a GPL-ish licence. If you did, then you are obliged to release the source code to anyone you distribute your software to under the same licence if the they request it. If you don't comply then you're infringing the copyright on that code.

What Oracle is doing is changing the future licencing code they themselves own the copyright to, which is completely fine. They're not obliged to provide any source code until they actually choose to licence it under the CDDL.
 
Last edited:
Lunknumb said:
you are obliged to release the source code to anyone you distribute your software to under the same licence if the they request it.
Click to expand...

So the emphasis there is on the *request*? One could use code and not have to make changes available until they are requested to be so?
 
Not publishing until requested is also a violation.

You should read the text of the GPL. Unless most legal documents the GPL is actually quite clear.
 
If they own the code, they can distribute it under any terms they want. They can distribute a commercial copy with a standard commercial "don't copy that floppy" license at the same time they're distributing it under an OSS license. The only people affected by the source-code sharing clauses are those that redistributed the software under that license - the original owner is not bound to those terms.
 
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