Robert Schuster wrote:
Unfortunately, such suppositions aren't worth much in legal terms (and
let's get the obvious IANAL disclaimer in here before I say any more).
If that is the problem couldn't we get an official stance from Sun that
prevents that? Something saying: "if some part of code from GNU
Classpath looks similar to code in OpenJDK the FSF is not sued for
copyright infringement".
Dalibor?
IANAL, but that wouldn't seem to be very useful in practice - it would
be an
attempt to have a very vague 'technical' solution for the lack of
working 'social' ones.
For Classpath, fortunately, we have a working social solution: Mark ;)
In general, if you are not completely sure about whether you can
contribute a
specific piece of code to GNU Classpath, please ask Mark about it. He
gets to set
the bright lines of what's an acceptable contribution policy for
Classpath, and he's
done a remarkably good job at that as the project's maintainer, I think.
an ideal world, both would be under GPLv3 and we'd share code between
the two as intended. On the other side, I've not seen as much code as
I'd expect (like the AWT peers) move into OpenJDK either, but I think
this is less legal and more process related.
Dalibor, could you give us something from Sun's side on this issue?
I am a bit confused about Sun's attitude towards (L)GPLv3.
I hope http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/faq.jsp#g34 helps,
for the time being that the FSF is working on the draft update of the
exception language for V3.
Once that's finished, I think it would make a lot of sense to evaluate
what the effects would be for the existing scenarios of VMs using GNU
Classpath, and the same for OpenJDK, and hopefully come to the same
conclusions, due to a mutually fruitful discussion of the implications
of the license during its (public) drafting/comment process. But the FSF
has not started that comment process yet (and I'm sure the FSF has good
reasons to take its time to do it right), so there is not much one can
really say about it.
If you are looking for a broader, independent evaluation of Sun's
attitude to GPLv3, Palamida, the site tracking GPLv3 conversions, lists
Sun as a significant adopter of GPLv3 in GPLv3's first six months, at
http://gpl3.blogspot.com/2007/12/gplv3-year-in-review.html
cheers,
dalibor topic
