Etienne Gagnon wrote:
Hi Dalibor, Leo, and all,
Archie wrote:
3. So what do we do? My wish is to give SableVM the benefit of the
doubt. If there's something in there they claim is "theirs", we
can take it out and replace it. I'd rather do that than argue
about it. We should remember that JCVM owes SableVM a debt of
gratitude and respect their wishes.
Etienne wrote:
So, if the Harmony project has no problem acknowledging the shared
Copyright of SableVM authors on JCHEVM, I will get in touch with these
authors to get their consent to a license change.
Geir answered:
That's excellent! I see no problem with that. We traditionally give
credit where credit is due for anything we redistribute.
So, just to make things Cristal clear:
1- I do claim shared copyright on JCVM/JCHEVM. I do not and will not
back down from this.
In interpret this claim to be for some number of specific areas, such as
threading and locking, and some others which we haven't quite nailed
down yet.
2- As far as I can tell from the above, both the ASF and Archie Cobbs
seem to agree to acknowledge this shared copyright.
No. I hope this doesn't appear to be harsh, and I'll explain after, but
I need to make this clear :
The ASF does not at this time acknowledge the validity of your claim of
shared copyright. We acknowledge that you have made a claim, have taken
the step of immediately ceasing any distribution of the disputed code,
and are making our best effort to get to the bottom of the problem with
the intention of arriving at an amicable and mutually agreeable solution.
When I said "That's excellent!...." that was my "run for the airport"
message - I meant that if you dual-licensed the code, we'd have no
problem in acknowledging the authors of code we redistributed or made a
derived work from. Sorry if I was confusing.
3- The only "obscure area" that is left (i.e. an area where there is no
explicit agreement between all involved) is: which exact parts can be
claimed "independent" work and which cannot not. It seems easier to
agree to simply state the shared copyright on JCHEVM and leave the
detail of exact files and lines out. Personally, I claim co-ownership
on the whole derivative of SableVM. I am sure Archie Cobbs would do the
reverse. Unfortunately, it would probably be quite difficult to settle
this out of court. Do you really want this to escalate that far?
No one wishes to escalate anything - I'm sure you don't, and I'm sure
that we don't.
4- Once this shared copyright is acknowledged, there is a license issue
to solve. The ASF has not been given a permission by SableVM authors to
distribute the derivative work, namely JCHEVM, under the Apache License.
This is where I am amicably proposing a hopefully elegant solution: to
ask SableVM authors to give such permission, so that we can all go on
with our lives and continue development. Anyway, I have made SableVM
Free/Opens Source so that people can copy, share and derive code from
it; I see no reason not to let people do so. All I am asking for is a
little respect of my copyright on software to which I have dedicated
years of work.
And we are certainly working to do that.
Suppose we do this (and this is me just throwing out solutions for
discussion...)
Instead of you having to go through the labor of finding all the
contributors to SableVM to make such a licensing statement, why not do
it for the thread and lock code? Do it under a license such as MIT so
it's compatible with the LGPL (or dual LGPL + AL ) and then we will give
credit to the authors and the project.
If that's ok, and further, that makes you comfortable to drop #3 above,
does this solve it for all?
geir
