Hi Chris, A little clarification. I don't claim that you can't study another's Free/Open Source (F/OS) VM source code, or that you can't contribute to multiple VMs over time. I claim that this does not allow you to COPY one VM's source code into another one without respecting the Copyright.
Mainly, I was was arguing about one specific case at hand. (Experience tells me that theoretical discussions of hypothetic cases can lead to endless flame wars). Please have a look at the files pointed to by Archie Cobbs. You will see there similarities that go well beyond the general idea you get by reading another F/OS VM's source code. So, in most cases, it shouldn't be a problem to read another implementation's code. Yet, I would warn the Harmony "class library" developers to be careful on how they "study" other class libraries such as GNU Classpath. It is OK to *occasionally* read the source code of GNU Classpath and see how they resolved *some* of the problems, yet it would be wrong if Harmony started copying (or "re-writing similarly", if that's clearer to you) GNU Classpath. Let say that taking a few days after reading the source code to work on something else, before coming back to the problem and think about some "independent" solution/implementation, would be highly recommended so that the code you write doesn't end up being an "intelligent copy" of other's code. Anyway, this is simply my little personal recommendation about it. Anyway, as I am not a Copyright holder of either class libraries, so you can take my opinion with a grain of salt. ;-) Note that as long as you are the Copyright holder, you can copy your code as much as you want, unless you assigned it to somebody else, in which case you should respect the rules of your assignment contract. Have fun! Etienne Chris Gray wrote: > I do hope this is correct, because otherwise the pool of potential VM > developers is even smaller than we thought it was. Heaven help me (and Wonka) > if Dalibor finds out that for a few weeks at the end of the last century I > worked on a port of Kaffe ... -- Etienne M. Gagnon, Ph.D. http://www.info2.uqam.ca/~egagnon/ SableVM: http://www.sablevm.org/ SableCC: http://www.sablecc.org/
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