[snip lot's of interesting legal conversation that I can't keep up with]
To me, the core question for the Derby community is do we want to interject an extended commercial external dependency into our release cycle. To that I vote -1. It seems contrary to the Apache Way and all that makes it work: incremental development, contributor independence, release early often. It also seems to make this a legal rather than technical forum. There are perfectly reasonable technical release alternatives but there seem to be legal issue's getting in the way. I suggest the lawyers take this off line, and find a solution so Derby can release with the implementation based on the draft and subject to change. The lawyers on both sides of the table seem to work at the same place, so I am sure negotiations can't be too difficult. If they are, then I think Java DB will just need to fork of temporarily and sync back up to us when ready to play again the Apache Way.
10.2 has already been far too long of a release cycle. In large part the delays already are related to this legal issue and I think we need to stop it. I seen 10.2 as our *real* graduation from incubation: Will we as a community be able push out a real Apache feature release together and feel like we did it the Apache Way? Whatever precedents we set this time we should be willing to carry forward and this seems like a bad one to me.
Kathey
