The GNU Classpath website http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/faq/faq.html
is full of violations of the published guidelines for use of Sun trademarks: http://www.sun.com/policies/trademarks/. The trademarks should never be used as nouns or in possessives, but GNU Classpath's web site does that all over the place. The GNU Classpath project takes great care in establishing that developers are clean with respect to not having read the implementation's source code--but should developers also be clean from having read the API specification? The API's license file specifically says that nothing other than internal usage of the specification is allowed except for complete implementations that pass the required conformance tests. Perhaps for now the GNU Classpath project can claim that it is a pre-release product, but how will that evasion apply five or ten years from now? Besides, the GNU Classpath project claims that public release 1.0 will only implement a subset of the 1.2 API specification. Picking and choosing to implement only a subset one finds convenient has been proven in the past to draw legal ire. I don't see how there can ever be an official public release. But how long can that dodge that GNU Classpath isn't an official release be maintained without it's lack being merely seen as a legal evasion, especially if some free software comes to depend on it? Since the Free Software Foundation's Massachusetts address is splashed across the bottom of the web page, who's going to come forward to implement areas of the specification that are possibly covered by patents not under control of the specification's creator, even if the patents would only be enforced in the United States? _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
