Dalibor Topic wrote: > On Sat, Nov 05, 2005 at 05:58:20PM +0000, Tim Ellison wrote: > >>>Luckily there are several in depth books about >>>various parts of the core library. O'Reilly and Addison Wesley publish >>>some very good titles. Since real programmers use these books and the >>>examples they give they are often a more solid base to work from. >> >>At the risk of sounding boring, it is worth noting that the books' >>material is usually copyrighted and licensed too -- so we have to be >>careful not to copy examples from any reference material into Harmony's >>implementation or test suites where the license is incompatible with the >>ASL. > > > Licenses in real, printed books? > > I've only got three words: first sale doctrine.
It's not a restriction on the dissemintation of the info in the books that is limited, but copying verbatim a book's sample code into a test suite or as an implementation of the class library is probably bad form. To produce a good compatible implementation includes all of following the JavaDoc spec, behaving to the language paradigms as described in the books, passing the JCK, implementing the functional (and non-functional) expectations of applications. By the same token, we should expect to have to occasionally run compatibility comparison tests on the reference implementation (RI) APIs to determine behavior that is not covered well in the specification -- but certainly not infringe on the RI by reverse engineering. Regards, Tim -- Tim Ellison ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) IBM Java technology centre, UK.
