Dear Roy, Of course I have "used my own brain" to read the licenses, thought about the incompatibilities and come to the conclusion that with a bit of good will on all sides we could probably come up with some legal hacks to circumvent the issues. And I am also surprized and frustrated that the communication between ASF and FSF seemed to have been really bad for a couple of years. And that is really puzzling to me indeed because in my last 5 years of working with various FSF and GNU projects I have found people very helpful and cooperative. You seem convinced that the FSF is some evil entity completely unlike the ASF. But if you just talk to any GNU hacker or phone the FSF office you will notice that they are real people that have almost the same concerns as you about how to create an environment where everybody can run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve software together without fear of someone trying (through legal or other means) to disrupt that community. If a mail server goes down both a GNU and an Apache hacker cry from frustration. There have been positive signs on both sides. The ASF and FSF seem to finally talk again and try to explain their reasoning and legal interpretations. And that is good to see. But rebuilding trust after such a long time of misunderstandings on both sides about the intentions of the other takes time.
When we started Harmony we all assumed that the FSF and ASF would talk out their differences about ASL and GPL in the long run and that we could and should just start cooperating on the technical level. Why we are proposing to just use MIT/X for any harmony contribution is just to get on with business for now. So that all projects wanting to cooperate could reuse any new work coming out of Harmony. It seemed the simplest least controversial suggestion that would get us going without needing to bring up the old ASLv2/GPLv2 flamewars again. If you and others think we as Harmony community should not do that during incubation then maybe Apache isn't the place to do this harmony cooperation for now. Cheers, Mark -- Escape the Java Trap with GNU Classpath! http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html Join the community at http://planet.classpath.org/
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