>>>>> "Stuart" == Stuart Ballard <stuart.a.ballard@xxxxxxxxx> writes: Stuart> This is slightly strange to me. We (the Free Software community) are Stuart> forced to make our own test suite because Sun won't release theirs Stuart> under terms we can use, but when we do write our own, we put it under Stuart> a license that prevents even other Free Software projects from working Stuart> with it. Our test suite is under a stronger copyleft than Classpath Stuart> itself is! My recollection of our thinking, back when we started Mauve, was that surely the GPL would be fine, since nobody would be creating derived works and since we wanted the result to be free software. And, since we were heavily in the GNU world in those days, the default license was the GPL, and we saw no reason to change it. Of course we didn't anticipate today's weird world where people are working on free software but have an allergic reaction to the GPL, even for a package which has never had a release, and likely never will. Stuart> I understand why we want Classpath itself to be copyleft. But what on Stuart> earth benefit are we getting from preventing people from Stuart> "proprietarizing" our testsuite? I've actually had a query from a group that wanted to make a proprietary fork of mauve (after translating it to C++). Their plans didn't do much to induce me to want to change. Stuart> My understanding is that a license change could be difficult to effect Stuart> at this point because I don't think a copyright assignment has been Stuart> required for Mauve contributions and therefore there are probably a Stuart> lot of copyright holders, some of whom may be difficult to track down. Yes, I put the chances of this happening quite low. We've certainly had difficulty doing this with libffi, which is a much smaller project. Tom
