On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 18:40 +0200, Mladen Turk wrote: > Garrett Rooney wrote: > >> Anything else is just another GNU release. > > I fail to see how comments like this are helpful to anyone. > > It's not a hostile, not at all, but the GNU guys after all those > months flerting with Harmony didn't give any firm licence > standpoint. So AFAICT, the Harmony is GNU licenced. > So, any GNU classpath is *GNU* classpath and has nothing to do > with Harmony, unleass harmony leaves the ASF and joins GNU. > > Nothing hostile in that.
Right. I see you are eager to get to work and just solve things. That is good. And that is really what the GNU Classpath hackers also want. That is why we are working so hard on the new releases, because we want to see them adopted. And we want to hear from the larger harmony community what is important for them, what works, what doesn't work, etc. We have been working on GNU Classpath for a decade and our harmony cooperation is really just only going on for a couple of weeks. Things do take time. One of the things that take time is building up trust. We would like to see the FSF and ASF, GNU and Apache projects work more closely together. But comments like yours don't give the impression that is really what everybody wants. Lets see if I can show you the thinking "on our side" to get us closer to each other. > the valuable news would be: > GNU Classpath 0.16 "Harmony!" released under ASF licence! So, why didn't we do that? GNU Classpath is the base for a lot of projects released under the GPL that integrate the core libraries (gcj, kaffe, kissme, jamvm, etc.). And the ASF license isn't GPL compatible. So that adopting it is not practical. Also we value copyleft (even if it is a very weak compromise for GNU Classpath) and we would like to use a license that is similar to the one used for the other runtime libraries of the GNU Compiler Collection (GNU Classpath is the base of libgcj, which is part of GCC). Using the ASL means the license is completely different and we fear that is confusing. And although the ASL has some patent-retaliation triggers, that we actually like, it doesn't have any copyleft features. So we have to make another compromise. We are working on a couple of 'legal' issues. First we will publish a reworded clarified GPL+exception text to show the compromises we are willing to make for GNU Classpath. There have been complaints that the current wording is unclear. So we will solve that. (This is waiting for one final OK, so I hope this will happen this week.) Second we are working with some FSF/ASF people on solving the bigger issues, not directly related to GNU Classpath. For GNU Classpath and the Harmony project we can change the licenses to get more collaboration with other groups. But for the larger body of code under the ASL and (L)GPL we cannot do that. And we would love to mix-and-match code from different code bases Apache and GNU into larger works based on a combination of both. So we now have a clarified description and explanation of the LGPL obligations from the FSF that hopefully makes it finally possible to use LGPL code bases in Apache projects. This is still waiting for confirmation from the Apache board though. And we are working on a way to word the patent-retaliation clause in the Apache license to make it compatible with the GPL. It is clear what the wording should be, but it isn't clear whether that will be possible. And lastly there are some discussions on GPLv3 and compatibility with other free software licenses. This last item is long term though, and might not be that interesting for Harmony if we are thinking weeks/months, not years. All these discussion do take time. And clearly on all sides people are a bit nervous about going all the way and fully embrace the "other side". And most hackers actually like working on code and leave "politics" to "others". (Whoever those others are.) But I hope that when we hackers show that we really want all these issues cleared and that we really want to have Harmony, that the various "software foundation boards" will have to come to an agreement. So please check out the code we have. And see what you like. If you haven't seen it look at these Eclipse and JOnAS packages for Fedora and notice how many Apache stuff is already in there! http://gnu.wildebeest.org/diary/index.php?p=97 I'll try to be a bit more active on this list to show that we GNU Classpath hackers do want to join the fun. But I must admit that I am more a hacker that just wants to hack on code and produce cool new GNU Classpath releases to get more free software working then a talker and politician. Please don't interpret any silence from my side as disinterest. I might just be coding to get harmony done faster :) Cheers, Mark -- Escape the Java Trap with GNU Classpath! http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html Join the community at http://planet.classpath.org/
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