Cliff Schmidt wrote: [...]
Yes - still just collecting notes and links on the Wiki; I'm sure some actual sentences would be more helpful -- sorry that's not ready yet.
Here's my $0.02 on two other issues (one cent each):
- In reading the email you wrote to Brian, I felt like you were saying
that there probably weren't any IP entanglements, but that it was under
the radar enough not to matter anyway. Personally, I think you should
do whatever is necessary to ensure Sun has no claims at all. The thing
with Apache is that we want to make sure that when some other organization wants to adopt an ASF product, they should feel confident
that everything they get strictly complies with the Apache Software License. "Under the radar" isn't enough to make most organizations
continue to trust the Apache brand.
First off, thanks everyone for spending the effort -- I didn't want to give the impression I was banging on the door -- I felt I'd walked into a room where there was an busy conversation and just needed to figure out where the men's room was. I'm honestly not one of those people who expect lightning responses to emails (Jon Bosak told me we all needed to take back our lives from the 24hr email response-mongering, and I agree).
So anyway, Cliff and everyone, thanks for your suggestions. I don't think there's much of anything to do as regards Sun, or that could be done. I'm not even sure how it would be possible to evaluate legally *how* different the XNode 1.1 API has to be from XNode 1.0 for there to not be IPR issues.
One thing that might be confusing this is that *I* had the intent of submitting the XNode 1.0 API to ASF while I was at Sun. This intent was not broadcast outside of the few programmers I was working with, and was never acted upon by anyone at Sun, including me. Legal never heard of it, nor were there any requests for forms, etc. The code is embedded deeply within the Java Registry Server; the only way you'd ever know it was there was to look at the java class names of the un-jarred file. There's no public docs on XNode 1.0 from Sun -- it was in effect the way *I* solved the problem of adding metadata to the Xindice database nodes we were storing. That's why I called it "under the radar." People solve problems all the time, and it's always a question of what constitutes a solution as being a "thing" worthy of IPR consideration. A class? A specific method?
Apart from the name "XNode", there are substantive differences between 1.0 and 1.1, and I can certainly change the name (there's about 2,400 hits on Google on "xnode", so I felt that was the least of my worries). XNode 1.1 shares the idea of a SOAP-like wrapper around an XML document as a container for metadata. The idea that you'd pass these around as "nodes" comes from Xindice. The wrapper syntax is similar to SOAP, the node idea is similar to ideas in Lee Iverson's NODAL project. But these ideas are not patented, and while the 1.1 API necessarily shares many of the same methods as 1.0 (e.g., you want get and set methods on creation and modification timestamps, etc.), they are substantively different APIs. They don't use the same code, the XNode 1.1 documentation is not taken from 1.0, etc. XNode 1.1 has a listener interface that isn't in 1.0. But they are similar because they both perform basically the same function of adding a metadata wrapper to an XML document, and were both written by me, and I use a particular style (as does anyone). I didn't go through the code and simply change the names. In fact, some of the class names are the same, but they don't share any code between versions.
In law, as you probably know, there's no real resolution in these kind of situations absent a judgement from a court. I don't believe that Sun can claim XNode 1.1 is theirs. As you probably know, there's probably *some* legal hook by which all the work I've done on my Ph.D. can be claimed to be Sun's IP, perhaps up until my death. I can't live that way, and if nobody will take this API I'll publish it myself and move on. (I don't say that to be snotty, just as a matter of lifestyle: I won't live in fear of lawyers. They may come after you whether there's a case or not, as we've seen in many high profile cases, like Clinton, or the whole current situation with web plugins.) As you might guess, I'm not happy about this whole situation, which is both trivial and confusing, and probably a bunch of wind in the end. But I also understand where ASF is coming from.
I just don't know how to proceed further.
> - You mentioned in a prior post that XNode may have broader application > than Xindice, and therefore may be a TLP. You missed the step in > between: being a separate subproject of the XML project. If this > sounds reasonable to you, I would post to the general list at > xml.apache.org.
I'm happy to do so, but I felt I should probably air the issues surrounding its submission prior to going to any specific project team (which is I believe what Brian thought too in suggesting I bring it here rather than continue to with the Xindice team). Oh, and yes I do think submitting it to the XML project is a reasonable idea.
I'm also planning at some point to open source my Ph.D. project "Ceryle", which includes an implementation of XNode running over Xindice. The code is somewhat tied into the Ceryle framework, but could be extricated into a base that could be reused in other apps. And there is no issue of IPR (at all) on the implementation code. A complete rewrite from the beginning, and quite different in a number of areas (better!).
Murray
........................................................................... Murray Altheim http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/ Knowledge Media Institute The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK .
"The current and future international political
environment severely constrains this country's
ability to conduct long-range strike missions." -- DARPA
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