Meeting with the Bobs (legal Q/A)

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Hi all,

I have finally setup a meeting Monday evening with two FSLC lawyers and
Brett Smith from the FSF to clear up any legal issues/questions we might
still have with GNU Classpath vs OpenJDK. Sorry this took some time, but
people were really busy on getting the final call draft of GPLv3 out the
door (go read it, it looks really good, but this is the last chance to
get things changed/cleared up if you have any doubts with respect to
GPLv3: http://gplv3.fsf.org/). And I really wanted to make sure I knew
what people wanted to do with respect to the various projects before
making any lawyers jump through hoops.

I explained that GNU Classpath is as much a specific GNU project with a
specific technical goal of providing a core class library (plus tools
now) for the java programming language. A project that is an official
GNU project with the FSF as legal guardian. As it is a social group,
that we often refer to as GNU Classpath & Friends. Which is a loose
conglomerate of projects and people around the GNU Classpath code base
and related projects. Which is why I explicitly asked the Software
Freedom Law Center to help both the FSF/GNU project as the community at
large with legal advise.

Looking at what people are already working on I can see that people will
move forward anyway, even without waiting for the lawyers to proclaim
that we are "in the clear" :) And that is how it should be, the project
must provide the (safe and legal) framework for the community to do
their thing, not the other way around. Everybody is pretty enthusiastic
helping out making sure our communities can keep working together and
moving forward. And making sure we can all cooperate with Sun's GPLed
openjdk java effort in any way you feel appropriate. The general feeling
was that there was some due diligence to do, but no major obstacles.

Our goals are to be able to use all or parts of openjdk for keeping
innovating the GNU Classpath & Friends projects that currently exist,
being able to contribute to openjdk in a way that is "safe" for the
community (the general feeling seem to be that there is a trust in Sun
at this moment, they have already changed the language of their
contributor agreement based on recommendations from us, but we do want
to be careful), and being able to use and recommend openjdk as a full
free java platform (after replacing any troublesome parts with GNU
Classpath code) so we can turn the java reference implementation that is
used all over the world into a pool and seed for a new GPLed Java world
that will ultimately help us innovate through the projects we all love
to work on.

So based on that I'll try to get us a (hopefully quick) timeline on
legal advise on the SCA agreement, interaction of the SCA with the FSF
paperwork, grantback process to follow if wanted, distributing
classpath-dropin-replacement packages to solve any encumbrances in
openjdk, analysis of the Assembly Exception in openjdk, GPLv2-only vs
GPLv2-or-later, GPLv3 and the classpath exception interaction, analysis
of external code and list of licenses in THIRD_PARTY_README from
openjdk.

To keep things contained I am not seeking any legal advise on trademarks
or jcp and tck issues for now, since those are more questions for Sun to
clear up than for the community to make a decision on (the status on
those didn't really change, we are, and always have been, all about
source code in the first place, just like openjdk is, so lets
concentrate on that for now).

Please let me know if I forgot any specific issue and I try to get it on
the agenda Monday evening and hopefully get us all some advise soon.

Cheers,

Mark



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