On Thu, 14 Mar 2002 03:04, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Mar 2002, Peter Donald wrote:
> > Correct - but even packages that presumably have IBM (and sun?) people
> > working on them have questionable legalities. Take xerces (or crimson),
> > at one stage they included the jaxp source code and even if it doesn't
> > anymore it surely links against it.
>
> They still include the jaxp source code, in xml-commons.
> But it's a clean-room implementation, made directly from the spec.
The "directly from the spec" is where the problem lies. It uses suns IP and
thus must the TCK. We don't and thus we are in violation of the license and
thus Apache and every user is open to being sued if sun chooses to do so.
> > Nor am I aware of any publically avaiable TCK for the JAXP library which
> > means that apaches xml parser is in violation of the license for JAXP
> > spec. I could be wrong but thats how I understand it and as such even
> > major projects at Apache are not legal. Fun eh?
>
> Probably it only mean it can't have a logo with 'jaxp' on it.
nope - if you use the IP then it needs to pass TCK - to do otherwise is not
legal. Unless we have another license agreement concerning jaxp with Sun that
is unpublished (as alluded to before) then we are not legal. It may be thrown
out in court but it is still expensive to fight it.
> We also use a clean room implementation of JMX in tomcat, same thing
> probably applies there.
JMX has always been under a different license and I didn't think you had a
clean room impl you just had some MBeans.
> AFAIK ( and again don't take my word for it, call your lawyer :-), clean
> room implementations based on a published spec are perfectly
> legal. Probably the name/logo is protected, but saying that your
> code implements/is based on jaxp/jmx/etc ( but is not 'certified' or
> 'compatible' ) should be ok.
Wrong - at least as I understand the licensing issue. To implement the
spec(s) in many cases you must pass the TCK. It can cost a fair chunk of $ to
run against the TCK which pretty much excludes all opensource projects from
ever legally implementing different specs (ie the XML ones we do at apache).
--
Cheers,
Pete
----------------------------------------------------
"The only way to discover the limits of the possible
is to go beyond them into the impossible."
-Arthur C. Clarke
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