Statement of Policies
There has long been quite a bit of discussion about different open source licenses and interpretations of these licenses. Here is our approach:
Hybrid development model: We are using a hybrid development model that combines open source and proprietary code. That development model worked for us - it allowed us to create the very first hybrid GNU/OpenSolaris Operating System NexentaOS that is now fully open, and is in turn the foundation of the NexentaStor appliance. That development model works for our end users, open source community and developers. In fact, based on the industry experience of the last 8-10 years, the hybrid development model is used by the majority of open source vendors. And the reason is simple: it just works.
Proprietary software: NexentaStor includes closed, proprietary pieces. We believe the storage market demands that certain data management capabilities be delivered as closed software and we also recognize and agree with the trend towards so called 'open core' business models whereby the core software is open source and additional pieces are not. We have spent many years writing code that addresses our users' particular data management needs. While we follow an open standards based hardware independent model, while we document and publish our management APIs used without exception by all NexentaStor management applications - it is still worth emphasizing that much of NexentaStor is closed and proprietary code.
Open source software: Nexenta Core Platform, or NCP as it is often called, is a fully open source base operating system, with the mission of being a complete and solid platform for other distributions as well as an excellent server platform. The community wiki for this project is at the Nexenta project homepage. NCP will always remain fully open source, and available to all free of charge.
CDDL: we interpret the CDDL license as requiring that any code that modifies CDDL licensed files must be contributed back. Interestingly enough, the text of the CDDL contains no definition on when or how this contribution must be made and makes no distinction, that we can find, between the 'initial developer grant' and the 'contributor grant'. We interpret the spirit of this obligation to be that we should immediately contribute back any fixes to the OpenSolaris kernel and should make these fixes widely accessible. We hereby verify that any such changes are accessible on our commercial site as well as on the NexentaOS site within 24 hours of their creation. You can easily find these patches here.
GPL and others: Certain portions of NexentaStor are under GPL and other FOSS licenses. Any changes to these portions of NexentaStor are immediately available in our source repository along with the binary packages.
Our plan: we will continue to innovate on top of OpenSolaris and Ubuntu to provide increasingly complete storage management solutions to our partners and end users while sponsoring the continued progress of the Nexenta Core Platform community. When necessary we will make fixes to OpenSolaris and, as per above, we will continue to immediately contribute these back. Our NexentaCore Platform is completely open and all developers interested in an OpenSolaris / Ubuntu platform for their creations with 12,000+ packages plus many other useful capabilities should strongly consider NCP. Commercial support for this platform will be announced in early 2009.
If you notice that changes to an open source package have not been provided, don’t assume we are evil! We made a mistake, and will work to correct it as soon as you notify us however you’d like, including our developer mailing list.