I'm back from vacation now. I hope that the community is comfortable
with the plan described below. In particular, I hope that people have
had time to ponder the licensing situation for 10.10.1. I would
appreciate the community's help in raising licensing concerns sooner
rather than later.
Thanks,
-Rick
On 2/15/13 12:28 PM, Rick Hillegas wrote:
I am volunteering to manage a 10.10.1 feature release, which is
described here: http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/DerbyTenTenOneRelease.
As you can see, the proposed schedule calls for a first release
candidate on 2013-03-18 and a target release date of 2013-04-12. I am
cautiously hopeful that that will give us plenty of time to stabilize
what I consider to be the driving features of this release:
o the ability to build and test Derby on Java 8
o the ability to run Derby on a Java 8 small device platform called
Compact Profile 2
I expect that there will be some discussion about this release. Like
10.2.1 and 10.8.1, 10.10.1 will be a release which exposes a new rev
of JDBC. There may be licensing concerns about 10.10.1 just as there
were about 10.2.1 and 10.8.1. Because I will use Open JDK to build the
release, I think that the 10.10.1 licensing situation is simpler, and
I have summarized my view of the licensing constraints at the end of
the functional spec attached to
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DERBY-6000. To repeat what is
said there: Open JDK is licensed under "GNU General Public License,
version 2, with the Classpath Exception" (see
http://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html ); according to GNU,
software under this license can be used to build unencumbered
production programs (see
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html ). In particular, I
call the community's attention to the following paragraph from that
web page:
"As such, it can be used to run, create and distribute a large class
of applications and applets. When GNU Classpath is used unmodified as
the core class library for a virtual machine, compiler for the java
language, or for a program written in the java programming language it
does not affect the licensing for distributing those programs directly."
I am going on vacation for a week so I won't be able to continue this
discussion until I come back on Monday February 25. Before going on
vacation, however, I wanted to post these plans so that the community
will have an additional week to prepare for the release and to think
through the licensing situation.
Thanks,
-Rick
