I've had different answers on legal-discuss to some of these questions.
I would encourage folks to avoid these kinds of detailed legal
discussions here in favor of discussions with generally more qualified
people on that list. I would merely like to state that the issue of
"derivative work" is NOT straightforward and the issue of the JRL is not
even as straighforward as it seems unfortunately and encourage further
discussion take place on legal-discuss.
Moreover, it is my personal opinion that the JBoss-Geronimo issue was a
very specific set of circumstances that have no real lessons to learn
for this project (though I speak only for myself).
-Andy
Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
On Jun 9, 2005, at 8:10 AM, Bruno F. Souza wrote:
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.
To be clear, there never was any JBoss code copied for Geronimo. One
issue from that discussion was similarity of design approach, but I
think that's ok. If we see that Kaffe has a great trick of caching the
$foo objects to solve the problem of constantly reloading from disk,
then I don't see a problem with us using the same strategy as long as
we don't use the source code from Kaffe.
This is how fields of knowledge grow - people learn from each other.
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?
This non-lawyer says yes, but there may be some clarification needed.
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.
Yes. One of the key lessons from Geronimo (which had nothing to do
with JBoss, actually) was that we should track the "bulk"
contributions, even from committers. These can be a small as a
developers favorite little string library or something, and if that
person has been doing OSS for a while, has probably licensed that under
other licenses to other projects. That dev is free to relicense if
they choose, of course. The problem is when someone does a source code
comparison and gets a match, questions are asked, and it's much easier
to answer the question when you have a database of contributions you
can refer to rather than "um, lets go look..."
geir
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
--
Andrew C. Oliver
SuperLink Software, Inc.
Java to Excel using POI
http://www.superlinksoftware.com/services/poi
Commercial support including features added/implemented, bugs fixed.
