Stuart Ballard writes: > (including the Classpath list as well as Mauve list here as I don't > know how many people actually read the mauve list) > > Recently on the Harmony list there's been some discussion of how tests > should be written and where they should be put. I chimed in pointing > out what I thought would be a no-brainer - tests for public APIs > should be in Mauve of course. > > I only just made that post and I haven't seen the responses yet, but > it occurred to me to look and see what Mauve's license is just to make > sure that wouldn't be a showstopper, and, well, as I'm sure many of > you know, it's GPL. > > This is slightly strange to me. We (the Free Software community) are > forced to make our own test suite because Sun won't release theirs > under terms we can use, but when we do write our own, we put it under > a license that prevents even other Free Software projects from working > with it. Our test suite is under a stronger copyleft than Classpath > itself is! Err, we created Mauve with a GNU licence because we're GNU maintainers. Hard as it may seem to believe, some of us *like* the GPL. > I understand why we want Classpath itself to be copyleft. But what on > earth benefit are we getting from preventing people from > "proprietarizing" our testsuite? > > My understanding is that a license change could be difficult to effect > at this point because I don't think a copyright assignment has been > required for Mauve contributions and therefore there are probably a > lot of copyright holders, some of whom may be difficult to track down. > But if it *could* be managed (and if the Harmony hackers could be > persuaded to put their tests there), I think it would be a major win > for everybody. > > Mauve gets a bunch of new contributors (Harmony certainly seems to > have a fair bit of momentum at this point) and code (I believe some of > Harmony's big contributions came with test suites that could be > integrated). > > Classpath and Harmony both get a bunch of new tests. > > Harmony hackers get to see that Classpath hackers aren't inflexible > GPL-zealots, and both groups of hackers get used to working together > on a project that benefits both. > > I don't think it's a coincidence that all the projects that originally > collaborated on Mauve ended up combining their class libraries, > either. Once people get used to working together, the level of > collaboration can only go up from there... Sure. But in the case of a test suite, none of us could think of a reason not to use GPL. Andrew.
