On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 12:51:41PM -0500, Stuart Ballard wrote: > On 2/16/06, Archie Cobbs <archie@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > This can make sense if the Harmony tests are Harmony-specific. > > Some are, some aren't. They plan to have a separation between the two > though. So Classpath will be able to use the non-specific part of > Harmony's testsuite. > > > Otherwise I don't see what the point is. > > The point is that, for whatever reasons (rational or irrational), some > people simply won't contribute to a GPL-licensed project. Some of > those people are Harmony contributors. If those people want to > contribute to a Java testsuite, which they do, it won't be Mauve as > long as Mauve is GPL. > Wait. Sit back. Relax. We've all been there (Sven, Mark, Tom, Anthony, Leo, Geir, Davanum, etc.), done that, and eventually figured out that trying to fix politics for fixing politics sake is not working that well. If there is no need for people to sit down and actually do something together, then there will be no results other than an enthusiastic exchange of opinions. While those things are fun, they are best done in a bar, with appropriate beverages. (That reminds me to ping Leo, Geir and the other ASF guys about their plans for arrival at FOSDEM). There is no harm done in Harmony and GNU Classpath being two separate projects, with largely different sets of code. There is absolutely no harm being done in Harmony duplicating the efforts of GNU Classpath, under a different license. We've got glibc, and we've got dietlibc, uclibc, newlib, you name it. Each of the smaller libcs fills a different niche, and so does Apache Harmony. It wouldn't have a niche that needed filling with source code contributions if it went and wed itself to GNU Classpath and Mauve: then all the good, easy spots for contributions would be already taken. And if you want to entice companies to dig out their 'crown jewels', and give them into the hands of the people, you have to give them a place where they are needed. What holds for class libraries, holds for test suites as well. I'd love to see $BIG_CORPS contribute their internal test suites to Mauve. Failing that, contributing their test suites to Harmony suddendly offers a better PR opportunity than simply sitting on the code forever. That opportunity did not exist before Harmony was created with big fanfares. We don't have to share code in order to grow together. Code duplication is not a bad thing, and Harmony needs time and space to find its own niches. Once it has found them, and successfully occupied them, and technically, shareing code make sense for everyone, sure, code will be shared. The FSF is putting the necessary mechanisms to be able to reuse Harmony's code in GPLv3, so in the long run, there are no issues at all that require political action today. > > There may be no real reason it should be GPL, but in any case it is... > > so.. what's the problem with that? I mean, from a practical standpoint. > > >From a practical standpoint it's deterring a fairly large body of > potential contributors... > Then Harmony is the perfect place for them. They put their tests there, and everyone wins. See, even if Mauve was licensed under a public domain license, a fairly large body of potential contributors has no desire to be associated with the FSF at all, for whatever reasons they may have. It's important to acknowledge that no matter what we do, we'll never be able to make everyone happy. But that's precisely what those other nice projects are for, so that everyone can find the one that suits them best. cheers, dalibor topic > > But you seem also to be asking the religious question "why GPL"? > > Not at all. I like the GPL. I think the GPL-with-exception license of > Classpath is the perfect license for what Classpath does. I use the > GPL on almost all my own code (although I prefer the LGPL for things > that are designed to be used as libraries). > > Even RMS points out that using non-copyleft licenses can be beneficial > when it's a net gain for Free Software as a whole (eg Ogg). > > And in this case I think there is such a gain, because the GPL is > buying us nothing (since there's no practical reason why anyone would > *want* to take Mauve proprietary) but costing us contributors. > > I seem to be in a minority though, so I'll drop the issue I guess. > > Stuart. > > -- > http://sab39.dev.netreach.com/ >
