Hi Roman,
getting back on the list.
Roman Kennke wrote:
Hi Dmitri,
first of all, you should continue discussion on the mailing list IMO. It
doesn't leave a good impression against 'the community' when half of the
discussions are held privately. I won't CC the list now though, because
you might have had a reason not to do this in the first place. If you
feel like we could discuss that openly, then please CC the list again
when answering.
Just to clarify: whenever possible legal questions are involved,
I tend to be a bit hesitant to involve large audiences, which
was the reason I went off the list.
However, in this case it will be useful for everybody
else to understand the restrictions under which we currently
operate.
I think there are still legal issues preventing
us looking at this code =(
Unbelievable. But oh well... Why exactly can't you *look* at the code.
Because it's not submitted via the SCA? I mean, it's free, open source
software after all. Are you not allowed to look at any code except Sun
copyrighted?
Yes, our understanding is that we can not look at your code until
you share the copyright (and we can be reasonably sure that you
own that copyright) - both of these conditions are not yet
satisfied here - the second one because you mentioned about
the possibility of your employer's involvement, so we wanted
to clarify that first.
I don't think it's Sun only policy, pretty much any company has it.
It is easy to become tainted by looking at other's people code.
The fact that the code is open-source doesn't matter, since
it's a question of copyright.
This particular piece got the attention:
> and will do the copyright grantback procedure and sign the SCA (I think
> my employer (aicas) already did so for me even) to make this code
You have to sign the SCA yourself, your company
can't do that for you - that's what the lawyers here
say anyway. Also, it is not clear from your message
if your company holds the copyright for this code
(i.e. Sun holds copyright for all job-related code
I write while working for Sun, so I can't say that
I own the copyright even if I wrote all the code
myself)
I have to ask my boss(es). I believe that I am the copyright holder of
that code because I didn't write it in my work time, and not for the
purpuse of using it in the JamaicaVM, and I submitted this particular
piece of code under my personal FSF copyright assignment. But it is no
problem for me to sign the SCA myself too. However, as I pointed out,
I'd first hear your opinion if that code is useful for you before I
start the copyright-grantback dance with the FSF. I hope that doesn't
cause a deadlock (if it really does, I might rethink, but it is my hope
that Sun opens up a little more in this respect).
I'm afraid that we won't be able to look at it until
you sign the SCA.
The good news is that Jim integrated his AA renderer
interface, which you use for your rasterizer.
I'll ask Jim again to at least publish the javadocs
now on the list, because it will take a couple
of weeks for the fix to get into the promoted build,
which you would be able to access.
Javadocs would be very helpful for a start.
Jim has sent the javadocs. He mentioned that he might
make one change (change AATileGenerator to be an interface
instead of an abstract class - we've missed that during
the review) before it goes out.
I hope we'll make it easier for you and others to work
directly with our 2D workspace instead of waiting for
the fix to propagate to the main j2se workspace.
Yeah, this seems like the biggest complaint right now. It is not really
possible for the community (e.g. me) to help out with code like this
when development is basically done behind closed doors. I am quite sure
that I could help out with both the rasterizer as well as with the
fonts, but it doesn't make much sense (and isn't very motivating) to
develop against code that is a couple of days/weeks old.
I agree that the current situation is totally unacceptable.
It is also unfortunate that you do not have access to our
code review system - although this is relatively easy
to fix - we can include you as a reviewer in relevant
code changes (the system is email and web-based).
We'll have to send you the actual diffs directly, though,
as you won't be able to access the web interface.
I think it would make sense to at least provide read access to the real
group workspace (if you're paranoid then maybe only to group members,
but then comes the question, how can anybody become a group member?).
I'll see if we could arrange that. I believe that it is our
intention anyway - once we move to Mercurial each "group" will have
their read/write mercurial workspace and members of the group
will have read and in some cases write access.
But at this point even a read-only svn workspace would help.
Thank you,
Dmitri
