Hi Etienne, > 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.
This is clear. I was a bit alarmed though by your reference to "clean room" conditions - clean room conditions are enforced in order to eliminate all possibility of taint, because there is a presumption that the owner of the copyright in A will sue the developers of B if they think they have even a chance of proving taint. In the open-source world the presumption is usually the other way around - that developer A will not sue developer B unless there is evidence of blatant plagiarism (and maybe not even then). I prefer to think that I can look at, say, Kaffe or Classpath to se how they approach certain issues without worrying that Dalibor or Mark or the FSF will use the mere fact that I have admitted to doing so in order to argue that anything I create in the way of core libraries or VM is somehow derived from their work. I would like that think that I can look at SableVM in the same way, provided I do just that: look, add the ideas to the broth already steaming in my head, and forget the details (the last bit comes very easy). That's something I don't allow myself to do with Sun's published code, because of the different presumption that applies. (For the record, up until now am untainted by SableVM, although I did pick up some interesting ideas from a talk you gave at JVM01 (and for which you won a prize, IIRC)). All the best, Chris -- Chris Gray /k/ Embedded Java Solutions BE0503765045 Embedded & Mobile Java, OSGi http://www.k-embedded-java.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] +32 3 216 0369
