On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 10:12:30AM -0400, Geir Magnusson Jr wrote: > > > Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
> > That said, it's hard to deny that the ASF has never experienced, in 10 > > years of operation, a single fork, despite the complete lack of > > reciprocity provisions in its licensing strategy, showing that, although > > counterintuitive, healthy communities are even more effective than > > licensing restrictions in protecting the evolution of a codebase. > > I agree with you, but there have been several forks over the years. IBM > forked httpd, IBM, JBoss, ObjectWeb others forked WS... I'd even argue > that Sun is technically forking Derby in their "JavaDB" product, and IBM > "pre-forked" Derby with the Cloudscape product that was the source of > Derby ... :) I'd add OpenBSD's fork of httpd to that pile. It was created since Apache License 2.0 was unacceptable for a core component of the OpenBSD distribution, and accordingly, the last acceptable version of httpd was forked, cleaned up from no longer necessary code, and is being maintained by OpenBSD developers separately. I also recall ASF's Director Roy Fielding posting on the debian-legal mailing list on November 14th, 2003, accusing Debian of maliciously forking httpd ... I assume he was whistled back by whoever holds the reigns on that project, as Apache didn't take legal action for all those alleged license violations, afaik, and Debian continues to distribute patched httpd packages, of course. cheers, dalibor topic > > There's nothing wrong with that, and it really never hurt our > communities (as evidenced by the strength of httpd and WS as > examples...), and in some cases, they came back or gave back. We have > no problems with people forking if they choose, as they tend to come > back anyway. > > And I'm expecting that people will fork Harmony code, and I don't think > that's bad. > > But that's orthogonal to the notion of patent freedom - I want to make > sure we don't wind up in a situation where no one wants to do anything > because of patent fears. > > Maybe the thing to do of patent-silent license is necessary is for Sun > to work with the rest of the industry (IBM, BEA, Apple, MSFT, Intel etc) > and create a "patent commons" of all patents each company owns related > to Java, managed runtimes, etc, with a clear covenant not to sue... > > geir > > (Given that I mentioned my employer, Intel, I want to make it clear > that this is my personal opinion and should not be taken to represent > the position of Intel Corporation....) > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > Terms of use : http://incubator.apache.org/harmony/mailing.html > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > --------------------------------------------------------------------- Terms of use : http://incubator.apache.org/harmony/mailing.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
