Hi, On Sat, 2004-06-26 at 22:44, James Damour (Suvarov454) wrote: > As some of you may know, I suffer the painful stigma of having been > tainted by reading the Sun Java source code. As such, I thought that my > only way of contributing to FLOSS Java would be as an application > developer (i.e. compile and run my Java apps under FLOSS VM's, and feed > back bug reports).
May I first say that having free application writers who submit bug reports is really, really appreciated. I had lots of fun with MegaMek (even though it doesn't satisfactory run with the free runtimes yet). > I may be able to fill in missing Javadoc comments in source files. > > However, none of us are certain enough about the licensing involved with > all of this, so we decided to check with the FSF, hence this missal to > you august Classpath hackers. We'd like an official review of the > issues to determine if a person who has been tainted can write Javadoc > comments in source code. Does is matter how tainted the person is (i.e. > I've read the contents of src.jar, but I've never agreed to the SCSL)? When working on code for GNU Classpath you should never refer in any way to any proprietary implementation, or actually care very much about what any other implementation does (except for what has been published in public resources such as books about the subject or publicly accessible web pages describing ways to make our implementation more compatible). This is both so you/we are not accused of direct copying, but also since a lot of the methods/classes are so narrowly defined that a clever implementation will most likely look a lot like any other implementation because people expect them to be compatible. In such a case we want each contributor to be able to clearly say that is certainly not because they looked or copied any other code (because they never saw it!). This is not just for the GNU Classpath project, it is a general rule for any official FSF GNU project (See Keeping Free Software Free): http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_2.html#SEC2 The FSF is pretty conservative in these matters. This is mainly just a simple risk-analysis. If certain actions mean it is easier to keep a GNU project out of any legal trouble then just do it. We want to make sure that GNU Classpath is now and will always be Free Software that developers can trust and feel free to use for whatever purpose. When documenting the core libraries there is a larger freedom to express yourself in a new, novel and unique way. When documenting any GNU Classpath code it is always advisable to actually read how we implementation things and then explain what it does on a higher level. But just like with writing code don't refer to any non-free documentation about that class or method which you are documenting at that time. (And if you do find free documentation about parts of the class library that you want to bundle with GNU Classpath please ask me or FSF legal for permission first.) > "No" is, of course, a perfectly acceptable answer; we just thought that > we've come up with a clever way for us poor unclean pariahs to take a > more active role in supporting FLOSS Java. Again, creating free software applications, testing with the free libraries, compilers and runtimes, submitting bugs and writing test cases for Mauve is all very much needed and appreciated. You also may want to think about writing higher level documentation. We are really in need of good high level overviews how to setup and develop with the free tools. Just a little guide on how you develop and debug in a non-traditional (but free!) environment with e.g. gcj and gdb would help a lot of people. Or making an overview of what is really available, tested and known to be working good enough in GNU Classpath to recommend to people wanting to make sure their applications written in the java programming language will now and in the future work with any free development environment would be great. There are lots of books on what is available and working with proprietary tools, but those are not that helpful at the moment for Free Software developers. All that said I will forward your request to FSF legal to see what they say. Cheers, Mark
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