This makes perfect sense to me.
Harmony's only compelling differentiation and thus reason for existence
at this point is that it is licensed under the Apache license. The
primary benefit of this license is that you can produce commercial,
closed source variations/extensions with almost no restrictions -- and
when that's what you need, it is truly wonderful. When that's not what
you need, it is still a fine thing in many cases.
In Sun's case with the JDK, however, the Apache license is not a fine thing.
They put untold amounts of engineering work into the JDK and TCK -- and
continue to do so. How can anyone expect them to make the TCK freely
available to open source communities who clearly directly support
proprietary, closed-source, and commercial derivations which will
1. Compete with Sun (e.g. J9) and
2. Do so without paying JDK, TCK, etc, licensing fees that the
parties involved (e.g. IBM) would otherwise have to pay to produce
such derivative works?
Sun has created and fostered an open source release of Java that does
not allow such derivations. I'm grateful for this and wouldn't ask them
to be more financially generous, most especially given their finances.
[I would ask that they wise up and build a solid, best-in-class,
omnipresent consulting arm so they can compete for end-to-end deals and
actually make real money off their open source offerings.]
I'm normally a huge fan of the Apache license and Apache projects.
Originally I was of the mind that Sun should release Java under this
license. In retrospect, though, I think that GPL was the only sensible
option for them financially -- and presents a nice barrier to
private/proprietary forks as well.
Perhaps Sun led the Apache Harmony team to believe the TCK restrictions
would be different or change -- and then changed their mind. If so,
that's unfortunate, but I can understand how Sun would change their mind
if they made this mistake.
--
Jess Holle
P.S. I've encountered incompatibilities in J9 code adopted from Harmony
that were less than pleasant. The only reason I can see for IBM going
this route (i.e. using Harmony classes in J9 at this point) is to
eliminate the need for them to license the JDK or TCK from Sun.
JodaStephen wrote:
> On Apr 7, 10:15 am, Martin OConnor <marti...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Therefore, it follows that Sun has licensed the JCK to the OpenJDK
>> project without a FOU restriction, because the GPL explicitly forbids
>> such a restriction.
>>
>
> Yes. Sun has a dedicated license programme for code that is solely for
> GPL code "substantially derived from OpenJDK" -
> http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/08/openjdk-jck
> - http://robilad.livejournal.com/17156.html
>
> "WHEREAS Licensee participates in Sun's OpenJDK Community and either:
> (i) has developed
> and seeks to distribute under the GPL License a compatibility-tested
> implementation of the Java
> SE 6 Specification that is derived from code made available to the
> OpenJDK Community; or (ii)
> wishes to verify that changes made by Licensee to the OpenJDK code
> base would not break
> compatibility;"
> http://openjdk.java.net/legal/openjdk-tck-license.pdf
>
> So, there are three choices to get the testing kit:
> - pay Sun money
> - derive from Open JDK and release as GPL
> - apply for the standard JSPA sponsorship and release under any open
> source license
>
> The third option is the one Apache wants to use, but can't as the
> testing kit there has been restricted by FOU.
>
> >
>
>
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