Not quite a classpath issue, but I was wondering if anyone here had any
views on this:
I'm likely to be doing some academic work for which the JavaSpaces APIs
look like they could be useful. Eventually, I'd be hoping to release my
code freely, but I don't think it's necessarily a Good Thing if everyone
who wants to experiment with it is force to agree to the SCSL. Come to
think of it, I'm not even sure I want to agree to it myself.
Having looked through the freely downloadable specifications, it seems
to me that doing a writing a simple cleanroom implementation of
JavaSpaces shouldn't be too hard. But Sun are hinting that they have
patents on parts of the technology, and that cleanroom implementations
may violate these. Does anyone know what these patents might be? Does
the fact that I'm in the UK make any difference?
If Sun really are going for a `partial open source, plus patents to
prevent cloning' approach, this seems rather worrying...
Any thoughts?
Thomas.
