Hi all, I have finally setup a meeting Monday evening with two FSLC lawyers and Brett Smith from the FSF to clear up any legal issues/questions we might still have with GNU Classpath vs OpenJDK. Sorry this took some time, but people were really busy on getting the final call draft of GPLv3 out the door (go read it, it looks really good, but this is the last chance to get things changed/cleared up if you have any doubts with respect to GPLv3: http://gplv3.fsf.org/). And I really wanted to make sure I knew what people wanted to do with respect to the various projects before making any lawyers jump through hoops.
I explained that GNU Classpath is as much a specific GNU project with a specific technical goal of providing a core class library (plus tools now) for the java programming language. A project that is an official GNU project with the FSF as legal guardian. As it is a social group, that we often refer to as GNU Classpath & Friends. Which is a loose conglomerate of projects and people around the GNU Classpath code base and related projects. Which is why I explicitly asked the Software Freedom Law Center to help both the FSF/GNU project as the community at large with legal advise. Looking at what people are already working on I can see that people will move forward anyway, even without waiting for the lawyers to proclaim that we are "in the clear" :) And that is how it should be, the project must provide the (safe and legal) framework for the community to do their thing, not the other way around. Everybody is pretty enthusiastic helping out making sure our communities can keep working together and moving forward. And making sure we can all cooperate with Sun's GPLed openjdk java effort in any way you feel appropriate. The general feeling was that there was some due diligence to do, but no major obstacles. Our goals are to be able to use all or parts of openjdk for keeping innovating the GNU Classpath & Friends projects that currently exist, being able to contribute to openjdk in a way that is "safe" for the community (the general feeling seem to be that there is a trust in Sun at this moment, they have already changed the language of their contributor agreement based on recommendations from us, but we do want to be careful), and being able to use and recommend openjdk as a full free java platform (after replacing any troublesome parts with GNU Classpath code) so we can turn the java reference implementation that is used all over the world into a pool and seed for a new GPLed Java world that will ultimately help us innovate through the projects we all love to work on. So based on that I'll try to get us a (hopefully quick) timeline on legal advise on the SCA agreement, interaction of the SCA with the FSF paperwork, grantback process to follow if wanted, distributing classpath-dropin-replacement packages to solve any encumbrances in openjdk, analysis of the Assembly Exception in openjdk, GPLv2-only vs GPLv2-or-later, GPLv3 and the classpath exception interaction, analysis of external code and list of licenses in THIRD_PARTY_README from openjdk. To keep things contained I am not seeking any legal advise on trademarks or jcp and tck issues for now, since those are more questions for Sun to clear up than for the community to make a decision on (the status on those didn't really change, we are, and always have been, all about source code in the first place, just like openjdk is, so lets concentrate on that for now). Please let me know if I forgot any specific issue and I try to get it on the agenda Monday evening and hopefully get us all some advise soon. Cheers, Mark
