http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/06/04/nukes.html
Sorry for the late entry on this topic but I was reading the whole thread and cogitating a bit... The preceding link is somewhat tangental to the entire letter discussion, but I found it relevant enough to raise a particular observation: The use of PostNuke code as inspiration is really the gist of the article. The developers liked PostNuke but it didn't scale so they made it scale in a language/architecture they knew well. The open source world benefited from a new Java CMS. The developers produced working code that embodied the ideas of PostNuke in an alternate, logically similar implementation. To me, that is the spirit of open source. PostNuke is therefore interesting as it is a concrete example where the wholesale transfer of code (albeit through the mechanism of porting from one language to another) is quite acceptable to JBoss Group. This example makes me wonder how tangled the web of legal letters can become. If the Geronimo project decides to implement a CMS (simply because a CMS is an application which is relevant to and useful in the creation of web applications) and if features in the open source, widely distributed PostNuke code seem to represent a "best of breed" approach which the Geronimo project would like to adopt...would developers have to jump through hoops to avoid possible similarities to the existing JBoss implementation? An implementation which, by the wording of its own author, is "blindly copied" in places? I have used JBoss successfully on projects and I think that they have achieved a great deal, but the log4j examples cited in the letter made me feel that this question should be raised as it may have bearing on future features/sub-projects. Particularly, it is clear that the log4j examples are quite well distributed and "open source" yet have been used as part of a legal overture. Thanks, James __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
