On Jun 9, 2005, at 8:10 AM, Bruno F. Souza wrote:
Dalibor Topic wrote:
You can look at free software and work on other software as much
as you want to, as free software licenses do not claim further
rights beyound the rights granted to the author through copyright
laws. I.e. if you copy or modify free software works, you are
bound by their license terms, as the copyright laws grant the
authors a say in derivative works. If you don't do that, then the
author has no say in your own, original work. You are allowed to
study free software (freedom 1 [1]). You can do what you want with
that knowledge, modulo patents and creating derived works.[0]
Well, the "tainting" (if that can be said that way) on open source
licenses only have any effect if the original license has some
reciprocity rules (like the GPL/LGPL for example) that prevents you
to use the code anyway you want. Under copyright, you cannot simply
copy the code, and as such, Harmony's code should not bear any
resemblance to other free J2SE implementations to which the license
is not Apache compatible. As seen in the JBoss vs Geronimo legal
discussion, we should probably be careful here as well.
To be clear, there never was any JBoss code copied for Geronimo. One
issue from that discussion was similarity of design approach, but I
think that's ok. If we see that Kaffe has a great trick of caching
the $foo objects to solve the problem of constantly reloading from
disk, then I don't see a problem with us using the same strategy as
long as we don't use the source code from Kaffe.
This is how fields of knowledge grow - people learn from each other.
And another can or worms is Sun's research license (JRL), that
specifically says:
B. Residual Rights. You may use any information in
intangible form that you remember after accessing the
Technology, except when such use violates Sun's copyrights
or patent rights.
That pretty much spells out the same as what Dalibor said:
> You can do what you want with that knowledge, modulo
> patents [rights] and creating derived works [copyright rights].
So, if we're allowing (with the mentioned care to not infringe
copyright rights) anyone to work on Harmony that have worked on the
open source implementations, should we allow those that have read
or worked on Sun's code under the JRL the same treatment?
This non-lawyer says yes, but there may be some clarification needed.
Or for the sake of extra care, we should avoid both or one of the
situations? Maybe that would be going too far? Geronimo did not
avoid contributions from people that worked at JBoss, and I
understand that besides some trouble along the way, it all turned
out OK in the end.
Yes. One of the key lessons from Geronimo (which had nothing to do
with JBoss, actually) was that we should track the "bulk"
contributions, even from committers. These can be a small as a
developers favorite little string library or something, and if that
person has been doing OSS for a while, has probably licensed that
under other licenses to other projects. That dev is free to
relicense if they choose, of course. The problem is when someone
does a source code comparison and gets a match, questions are asked,
and it's much easier to answer the question when you have a database
of contributions you can refer to rather than "um, lets go look..."
geir
More food for though...
--
Bruno.
______________________________________________________________________
Bruno Peres Ferreira de Souza Brazil's JavaMan
http://www.javaman.com.br bruno at javaman.com.br
if I fail, if I succeed, at least I live as I believe
--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
