On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, Peter Donald wrote: > > 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.
This is getting intersting... To be honest, I allways believed that Jaxp, and all are 'open standards'. ( i.e. they allow clean room implementation ) Again, we need a lawyer here - but if this is the case I think we should do something. There are plenty of open standards ( too many even :-), and if a spec is not open, it shouldn't be used - but an alternative ( or a new open standard ). I hear many java APIs are cloned to .net, and that a lot of .net is 'open standard' - I'm pretty sure it has a lot of APIs that could do the same thing as the non-open ones, and we can clone them in java. An open API/standard should be used whenever possible. > 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 is unpublished (as alluded to before) then we are not legal.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. That's why we need the list of software/licenses that we can use and redistribute, and what's not on the list shouldn't be used. Especially software that implements non-open standards. > > 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. We use openjmx ( now called mx4j ), that's a clean-room impl of the spec ( AFAIK ) > > 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). Ok, I didn't know that - and I bet many other people are in the same situation. If anyone can confirm this with a professional, then I think it should be displayed pretty clearly on a visible page, and we should find alternative open standards to use. Costin -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
