Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: > You get a list of files. You can go check them. Is how those matches > were done significant? Can you tell me the algorithm your head uses? :)
Well, we could simply throw a dice, if how the matches were done is not significant. :) > Ah - yes. That's they key. We would only compare against code that we > were comfortable having someone look at. Specifically, I'm afraid of > Sun code accidentally getting into our codebase, because the stuff is > so prevalent in the Java community. It's in every Sun J2SE distro.... That should be easy enough: just grep for "confidential J2SE software from Sun, play nice and play fair!", or whatever the copyright headers on such Sun software say. Stuff beyound that would probably go beyound uncovering simple accidents, and would require quite a bit of cooperation from Sun to disclose the pedigree of their implementation's code and equivalent copperation from the contributors. Let me give you another scenario: Purely hypothetically speaking, Sun's implementation may include third party software, and changes to such software. Contributions from others may include the same (open source, for the sake of argument) software and similar changes in order to meet specific, common goals defined by common specs. How do we determine for sure who wrote what when, and who copied what from whom, if that was OK then, and if the contributor has the right to contribute his changes? In case of conflicting opinions, what do we do? Or even worse, if code comes from a now defunct and dead open source project from 1997 [1], with noone around any more, the web site and archives wiped out, what do we do? :) I guess the point I'm trying to get across is that the best we can do with our resources are very simple, almost trivial checks like checking if the copyright headers are sane. Anything beyond that gets very, very joyously complicated very quickly, without permanent active assistance from everyone, including the copyright holders of the proprietary implementations. Whether copyright holders of proprietary implementations would be pleased to dedicate resources for Harmony's potential regular inquiries about their code's pedigree, I don't know. I'm not sure a pull model scales well in this case. :) cheers, dalibor topic [1] Ueber-hypothetically, a BSD-ish licensed fork of Kaffe from back then. It used to have a BSD-ish license, back in the days, and it got forked quite a bit, afaict from the mailing list archives. All of that was before my days, and quite a few of those forks are ... resting.:)
