Interesting quote about the CDDL from /.: <quote> Not to worry. Firefox is available under GPL. MPL was never widely used outside of Mozilla, and that chiefly in the period before Mozilla was widely used. At that, it's a better license than the CDDL. The CDDL specificly allows distribution of binaries that depend on proprietary licenses of various forms. One of the forms would make the source code visible, and not clearly warn users that it was dependant on having licensed certain software patents...i.e., that the end-users were liable if they didn't properly license the patents required to use the software, and the company could know about it and not warn you. The MPL protected against that. The CDDL removed that protection. So, I ask myself, *why* would Sun make such a change? (I asked Sun, too. They never responded...which doesn't prove anything.) </quote> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195728&cid=16039849 So maybe Sun can take this opportunity to address Software Patents surrounding Java? David Fu. > Hi Patrick, > > On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 13:11 +0000, theUser BL wrote: >> Have a look at >> http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=18036&tstart=0 >> there I have written a qustion at Mark and other developers. >> >> It would be nice and I would be happy, if you answer it. > > Seems you need to have to register for some sort of account on that site > to post there, but feel free to quote or redistribute my response if you > want. > > I cannot possibly hope to speak for all GNU Classpath developers since > there are just too many and GNU Classpath is really a community of > communities, lots of individuals, organizations and projects working > together for various reasons. But I think you are right that we are > pretty flexible and accommodating. The common theme in the last 8 years > has been cooperation and respect for each others work. This also extends > to licenses, anything upward compatible with the GPL seems fine with the > community. So you are also right that either the GNU Classpath license, > GPL plus some exception, GPLv2 or v3, LGPL, BSD or MIT/X would all > encourage cooperation between groups. Non-GPL compatible licenses seem > to fragment the community and nobody wants to see an incompatible, > proprietary fork of java. > > Sun has in the past chosen to use and create licenses like SISSL and > CDDL, which some say are explicitly designed to be GPL-incompatible so > as to not work together with the larger GNU/Linux community. Lets hope > they are sincere in wanting to work with the existing communities. As > soon as there is code available under a friendly license I am sure we > will see some sort of cooperation between the communities. But no code > is available atm, no license has been chosen and it isn't clear whether > Sun needs or wants help from the community with code that we can provide > for them to create a large free software platform together. > > Cheers, > > Mark > > >
