On Fri, 2006-03-10 at 00:20 -0800, Per Bothner wrote: > Dalibor Topic wrote: > > The only way GNU Classpath would be acceptable for Apache Harmony, afaict > > from > > our dicussions in the past year, would be if the FSF contributed it to the > > ASF, > > and had the ASF manage the project, under the Apache license. Anything else > > is > > non-option for ASF, for a variety of reasons. > > Harmony appears to be basically an attempt at a hostile takeover of the > Free Java movement. They're all in favor of cooperation - as long as > it is 100% on their terms. Complete surrender is all they will accept. > > I hope I'm wrong, but nothing I've heard suggests otherwise.
I think that is a bit harsh. Dalibor's description of the project and how Apache deals with it seems correct though. It is clear that a lot of the founders of "Harmony" that came from the GNU Classpath, GCJ, Kaffe, IKVM, etc communities had envisioned a different kind of cooperation. And I think most of use really tried to work hard for the last 9 months to make it work and tried to explain how a community works, what the goals of the different projects were, how we could do this together, etc. Some of us are rightly frustrated that it didn't work out. It isn't like we didn't try very hard and didn't put a lot of energy and effort into it. In the end the new people seemed only interested in doing all things "the Apache way". I don't think the legal/license issues were real blockers. It is just used as an excuse to not work together (for now). It would have been easy to solve if anything to have the code both ASL and GPL compatibility was acceptable to them. I also think we as GNU Classpath community are a bit intimidating. We have so many people working on so many wonderful things which aren't "just java" (.net/mono integration, aot/gcc integration, pushing distribution/packaging issues to the GNU/Linux distributions, creating an platform for innovative research and alternative runtime models, etc). It isn't easy for anybody to grok such a community with millions of lines of free code. And clearly some of the Apache people are proud of their own way of doing things. I just want to add that the FSF has been very helpful in trying to resolve any issues with respect to cooperation. Several of us (Dalibor, Tom and I) have had multiple (hours long) teleconferences with the FSF and ASF people to try to get a common understanding of what the real issues were. And I know a lot of people have tried to explain how we work together, why GPL-compatibility is important to our community, and how to resolve any perceived legal issues. Either by talking directly to people, using teleconferences or by phoning people directly. The lesson to draw from this is probably that if you are talking for months with several people on how to cooperate and the only people that agree with you are the people that you are already working together with and that are actually working on code together, then you might want to just cooperate with the people you are already sharing and working on code with and not with the people only talking and disagreeing. There are also a couple of good things though. It is clear that more people are frustrated with proprietary java as controlled by Sun (and some large JCP companies). That will only help us all to get awareness that we have to solve this problem (hopefully together). And the FSF did listen and incorporated a lot of ideas in the draft of the GPLv3. I believe the language is more clear and the biggest improvement is that there has been a lot of thought about being compatible with other free software licenses that have extra requirements like the ASLv2 and EPL for example. Which means that as soon as GPLv3 is adopted a lot of these "it is incompatible, so we cannot cooperate" discussions will hopefully be over and we will just reuse anything useful and really work together more. I do encourage everybody to take a look at http://gplv3.fsf.org/ Cheers, Mark
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