Dalibor Topic wrote:
You can look at free software and work on other software as much as you
want to, as free software licenses do not claim further rights beyound
the rights granted to the author through copyright laws. I.e. if you
copy or modify free software works, you are bound by their license
terms, as the copyright laws grant the authors a say in derivative
works. If you don't do that, then the author has no say in your own,
original work. You are allowed to study free software (freedom 1 [1]).
You can do what you want with that knowledge, modulo patents and
creating derived works.[0]
Well, the "tainting" (if that can be said that way) on open source
licenses only have any effect if the original license has some
reciprocity rules (like the GPL/LGPL for example) that prevents you to
use the code anyway you want. Under copyright, you cannot simply copy
the code, and as such, Harmony's code should not bear any resemblance to
other free J2SE implementations to which the license is not Apache
compatible. As seen in the JBoss vs Geronimo legal discussion, we should
probably be careful here as well.
And another can or worms is Sun's research license (JRL), that
specifically says:
B. Residual Rights. You may use any information in
intangible form that you remember after accessing the
Technology, except when such use violates Sun's copyrights
or patent rights.
That pretty much spells out the same as what Dalibor said:
> You can do what you want with that knowledge, modulo
> patents [rights] and creating derived works [copyright rights].
So, if we're allowing (with the mentioned care to not infringe copyright
rights) anyone to work on Harmony that have worked on the open source
implementations, should we allow those that have read or worked on Sun's
code under the JRL the same treatment? Or for the sake of extra care, we
should avoid both or one of the situations? Maybe that would be going
too far? Geronimo did not avoid contributions from people that worked at
JBoss, and I understand that besides some trouble along the way, it all
turned out OK in the end.
More food for though...
--
Bruno.
______________________________________________________________________
Bruno Peres Ferreira de Souza Brazil's JavaMan
http://www.javaman.com.br bruno at javaman.com.br
if I fail, if I succeed, at least I live as I believe
