Hi, On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 00:54, David Holmes wrote: > > It got worse the last years. Specs, or at least draft specs would be > > published publicly without having any click-through license to which > > people have to consent. There are also some nice counter examples though > > of expert groups doing everything publicly (JSR133 about the memory > > model, JSR166 about concurrency util classes). > > Even those "open" JSR's ultimately have a click-through license on the final > spec.
I just looked at these two jsr's and both are not even available through a click-through. (Strangely enough both just point to the sun 1.5.0 implementation documentation, which as far as I know doesn't include the specs at all.) JSR133 is available at http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/java/memoryModel/ JSR166 is available at http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/concurrency-interest/ The JCP also doesn't require the (final) specifications to be provided under a click-wrap. As these JSR's show it it perfectly fine to publish the specification, reference implementation and test compatability kit in the public domain. (Unfortunately, as you point out most JSRs don't do this at the moment. Please tell specification leads about the option to do everything in the open.) > But it does concern me that such unofficial sources would be preferred over > the actual specification. Of course actual specifications are preferred over unofficial sources. But then the actual specifications have to be available in such a way that we can be sure that we are free to use them. Also the use of unofficial sources is often explicitly encouraged since what you might call the "actual specification" (like the api documentation sun publishes online) is often not strict enough to describe what is actually expected. More often than not I have found books published about various packages are much more in depth than the "official" specification. > Further, given Classpath's goals, I don't see how > it could ever claim to be what it is, without requiring compliance with > Sun's licenses regarding independent implementations. I am not sure I am following you here. The given goal of GNU Classpath is to provide a free implementation of the core class libraries so that people can use these libraries to create (free) software for the GNU system. For this we try to be as compatible as we can be while making sure that the freedoms of the GNU project are preserved. Hopefully we make this happen while also being 100% compatible with other implementations. GNU is not Unix, and GNU Classpath is not (the core) Java (library). We just don't have a cute acronym to express that. Cheers, Mark
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