Mark Wielaard wrote: > Hi, > > On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 09:30:34AM +0200, Chris Gray wrote: > > > > I would also invite people to look at ACUNIA's Wonka VM, > > <URL:http://wonka.acunia.com>. Like IBM, we already developed our > > own class libraries, but a Classpath/Wonka hybrid would appear to be > > feasible from both a legal and a technical point of view. Of more > > practical value (probably) would be a gcj-Wonka synthesis. > > Nice. From you package report page I get the impression that you have > a lot of classes for 1.1 and 1.2. But it does not seem as complete as > Classpath at the moment. But you have a working AWT implementation! > And some javax.crypto stuff. Cool. >
Up to now the development was mainly driven by our own internal projects, so our coverage is a bit skewed: we're probably ahead of Classpath in some areas, but I'd agree that we're behind in others (notable text handling). > > Was there a reason you could not use (or cooperate with) GNU Classpath > for your VM? > When we began the project it was not known under what license the code would one day be released, so we were wary of basing a large part of it on a project which had its own licensing agenda, so to speak. Although using the Classpath stuff as-is didn't seem to present particular problems, we weren't too sure about e.g. tweaking classes to take advantage of our native code. The decision to go open-source was only taken a few months ago, and it could have gone the other way (i.e. making Wonka a closed- source product). > > Two legal nitpicks. (Please ignore them if you don't like legal issues.) > Your license is not GPL compatible (which may or may not be a problem). > The GPL incompatability come from clause 4: > 4. Products derived from this software may not be called "Wonka", > nor may "Wonka" appear in their name, without prior written > permission of ACUNIA NV. I'm not in a position to ignore legal issues, even if I don't like them. :-0 The GNU licensing page mentions that the Apache licence is not GPL- compatible, but annoyingly omits to say which clause is the offending one. We actually took one clause out, but it seems we picked the wrong one from the GPL-compatibilty point of view. :( > > This is the same as can be found in the Apache license which is also not > GPL compatible since it is an added restriction (although a minor one) > according to GPL clause 6. But since you actaully have a trademark on Wonka > this clause is not necessary. You could replace it with a fact (outside the > actual license text) such as "The following are trademarks of Acunia, XXX, > YYY, ZZZ. This license does not grand you any permission to use any > trademarks of Acunia when distributing derived works." That way it would > be GPL compatible (since then your claim is based on trademark law and not > on copyright laa)w. You might want to take a look at how AbiSource did a > similar thing with their trademark on AbiWord. > The clause is there to protect our `brand': if we can achieve the same result without breaking GPL compatibility then this would be very nice. I'll take it up with the powers that be. > > Your download does contain a COPYING file with the same clauses as menioned > on <http://wonka.acunia.com/licence.html>. But all source files and > documentation comes with a header that does not sound very open/free. > It would be nice to make it a bit more clear that the license agreement > mentioned in that text is acutally the top level COPYING file. Note for > example that all Classpath files explicitly state the license conditions. > This makes it much more clear what your rights are if you somehow only > received part of the code archive. > Again, I'll pass this comment on. The header is standard company-wide boilerplate, with one clause already removed because it didn't apply to open-source code: I'll try to negotiate some more customisation. > > Groetjes, > :) Beste wensen, Chris Gray VM Architect, ACUNIA _______________________________________________ Classpath mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/classpath
