Whenever I decide to take a holiday I can usually guarantee that something cool will occur in the IT industry in my absence.

Now this holiday has been slightly different in many ways. I had to cancel my flight due to a sudden onset of Vertigo 1 day before I was supposed to fly. If like me you have never experienced Vertigo before, thank yourself lucky!. Having no sense of balance and intense room spin whenever you open your eyes is no fun at all, it took at least 2 days for me to stop being sick.

Having been able to actually use my laptop in the last couple of days I notice that the “cool thing” I usually miss on holiday turns out to be big trouble all over OpenSourceVille, the majority of which seems to revolve around licensing and intellectual property.

Who could miss the BSD vs GPL debate that I’m sure will rage for a long time after the ath5k driver had the BSD license removed in favour of the GPL. Stealing code was suddenly the headline for this action and the rift between the “Linux” developers and “BSD” developers increased once more.
Personally I feel the license should be as “Open” as possible and always apply the BSD license where I can. I want to be recognised as the author of any work I produce and protected against any misuse of such work (liability). With OpenSource development taking place in clear view nowadays, such visibility can only enforce your ideas and intellectual property. Why complicate things with over restrictive licenses…

While still on the topic of licensing it seems John Birrell is having to start all over again with a new port of DTrace on FreeBSD. The CDDL this time preventing kernel hooks from being added to the FreeBSD kernel. This seems such a shame as DTrace technology provides a massive benefit for software developers and will starting afresh really change the situation?, If not through licensing I am sure there must be patents on the intellectual property that Sun could enforce on any DTrace port? Just look at what is going on between NetApp and Sun at the moment.

So from licensing issues to patent infringement where it seems ZFS may not be as revolutionary as Sun claim and in fact NetApp actually came up with some of the functionality back in 1998. Dave’s Blog outlines all the details in what I can only describe as an excellent explanation as to how NetApp have had to file a lawsuit against Sun. Strangely enough I originally heard about this from the MySQL Planet! and not from any of the Solaris / OpenSolaris Planets each of which have around 45 Sun employee feeds?

We develop software to improve our way of life. Licensing and Patents although often necessary seem only to be hindering progress… Still it keeps us busy re-inventing the wheel.

On a good note, I was around to see the launch of the iPod Touch - if you can call that good…I might just wait until the drive space increases before I buy one, 16Gig seems tiny these days but then again the Touch would come in handy for on the go web browsing.
I also noticed Oracle 11g had been released (I obviously missed that one), although only for Linux at the moment?. I’m no Oracle expert but seeing as Oracle provide Java based development tools and my previous installs had a lot of Java involved surely Solaris would make a better fit?

Image combined using artistry from Project TIMEMACHINE - http://www.timemachine.ne.jp/