Hi, On Mon, 2006-05-29 at 05:50 -0700, Leo Simons wrote: > On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 02:35:07PM +0200, Michael Koch wrote: > [merge talks] > > I would recommend not doing this. GPLv3 is not out. Our current license > > is not compatible with the ASLv2. We cannot combine the code currently. > Yup. > > Before looking at any kind of "merge", I strongly recommend holding out for > the GPLv3 just a little longer.
I agree with Michael and Leo here. If there is anything interesting that we don't have yet in GNU Classpath then merging in that code should only be done if it is GPL-compatible (otherwise it wouldn't really make sense since a large part of our user base uses GPL or is GPL-compatible now). Unfortunately our talks with the apache group about this never came to much. Dalibor summarized it pretty well recently: http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=14198&comment_id=110641 And although I feel that I wasted a couple of months of my life trying to cooperate with these people I still would like to see some real harmony happen. But for now I decided to focus all my energy on the FSF. They at least return my emails and take my suggestions seriously. They also make it very clear that the GPLv3 process is an open thing that is specifically meant to bring license consolidation: http://gplv3.fsf.org/rationale we have made a variety of possible license requirements compatible with the GPL, through an enhanced compatibility provision; thus we leave individual developers scope for choosing among requirements to apply for public use of their code. We have intentionally done nothing that might threaten to divide free software developers from free software users. That said if someone wants to try and speed the process up and get ASF/Intel to make sure the code can be mixed and matched with larger GPLed works immediately that would be great. Some other things to think about before doing any actual merging: - It should be something that is really maintained externally so we don't risk having to maintain someones else code if it gets abandoned. Or import things whose development process is opaque. - It should be at least usable with free runtimes and not just with proprietary ones. And work with all the platforms, processors and various runtimes we support now. - We have a pretty decent documentation standard (http://developer.classpath.org/doc/). Some of it is really better than the proprietary documentation. It would be a shame if new code didn't have any documentation. > It really really really looks like GPLv3 will > make it quite feasible for Classpath to take any ASLv2-licensed code and > combine/fork/modify/redistribute in lots of different ways. Not just all > the code going into harmony now, but also useful bits from projects like > xerces, xalan, and ant (eclipse too I believe, but less confident). In the > meantime, participate in the GPLv3 process and make sure everyone's aware > that there's an important "use case" for this :-) Maybe this isn't such a great one since there is no real code that GNU Classpath is missing at the moment. But it would be great for reusing for example apr, svn or httpd code in other projects, or for mixing and matching some of the jakarta-commons code in other projects. But I agree with Leo that the most important thing is that we create some real harmony around the GPLv3 effort. Go participate! http://gplv3.fsf.org/ Cheers, Mark BTW. I liked what Roman said about this all. It really captured my thoughts about it: http://kennke.org/blog/blosxom.cgi/2006/05/30 LWN asked me to write down what we have been doing as a group and how we make cooperation and harmony happen. They published that in their latest Weekly News: http://lwn.net/Articles/184262/ (Currently subscriber only, from Thursday on free for all!)
