Hi Tim, On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 08:53 +0000, Tim Ellison wrote: > ...and there are other bone fide open source projects that are important > to Harmony under any number of licenses. Obvious examples being in the > VM-space such as Kaffe (GPL) and Jikes (IBM public license). I believe > we should play nicely with all of them.
Right! That is also what made GNU Classpath big and strong. Be friends with everybody :) > I fail to see how anything other than full license reciprocity will work > in practice. Code that can only be passed in one 'direction' (Classpath > -> Harmony or Harmony -> Classpath) will be forked as soon as the code > is enhanced or patched by the recipient unless those contributions are > also multi-licensed. At best it will be a book-keeping nightmare. I wouldn't be that afraid. Of course every user has the right to fork any code they want. But in practice you have lost when you exercise that right. Then you are on your own. It really only happens when either it is something you just have to do now and the code just isn't precisely perfect at this time. (You make a fork, make your own thing and then contribute that back so you can pick it up next time. This is how lots of Free Software works. Almost every distribution has their own small forks of packages, but normally those forks are just temporarily and things flow back.) Or it happens when communication has completely broken down. But then you want it to fork. No need to keep on the same code base and yell at each other all day. It sadly does happen of course. But in practice when you have a healthy community around your projects things always work out in the end. Nobody wants to fork, but everybody wants to have the right to fork just in case. In a way all these existing projects (classpath, kaffe, gcj, cacao, jamvm, ikvm, sablevm, etc) are just forks of each other (or mergers of other projects). And they do even compete! But when you have enough dedicated enthusiastic people and technical direction around a project forks and re-merges are just part of the development process. We are constantly seeing new forks popup and then later merge stuff back in. A healthy diverse ecosystem is the best cure for fork-angst. Bookkeeping is an issue. But it is an issue we are dealing with already anyway. In the end it is just another checkbox. > It sounds to me like Leo, Cliff, et al have a good handle on the issues, > and they are doing the right thing by working them out for the generic case. Yes, I am happy about that. I hope we can show that it can work in practice with harmony already. Cheers, Mark -- Escape the Java Trap with GNU Classpath! http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html Join the community at http://planet.classpath.org/
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