At 11:30 30/10/00 -0500, you wrote:
>On 30 Oct 00, at 14:55, Peter Donald wrote:
>
>>
>> right - but unless you conform to j2EE exactly you are not conforming to
>> that platform. You are actually conforming to j2se with a bunch of
>> extentions. Think of j2ee as a blessed version of j2se + some extentions -
>> without the blessing there is no platform.
>
>Hi Peter,
hi ;)
>This is the statement I don't understand: "without the blessing
>there is no platform." Is there a regulated list of blessers, e.g. on
>the web pages at www.gnu.org? Why does Sun get to decide what
>is a "platform" under a license written by GNU for code copyrighted
>by jBoss authors?
Okay the GPL specifies that you don't have to GPL components that are part
of OS/Compiler etc. The interpretation of OS/Compiler with respect to java
is platform. Currently there is about 7 platforms from memory.
(micro/pico/personal/standard/enterprise+ others).
Sun decides what a particular platform is. However J2EE is a token platform.
J2EE == Blessing + J2SE + a set of fixed extentions.
If you are not on a blessed environment then it is not J2EE but instead
J2SE with extentions.
So why does SUn get to decide this ? Well because they can ;).
Why is GPL interpreted in this way ? Because that is the most legally
defensible position to take.
BTW Krishna Kumar just sent an indirect link to the article I referred to
via http://krishna.dhs.org/ which may be an interesting read (I gonna read
it a bit later on).
>Mind you, I'm not saying your toaster can be a platform. I'm saying
>that a bunch of software with the same structure, the same
>function, the same interfaces, the same methods, the same
>everything but name and version matching is, as far as a legal
>interpretation would be concerned, the SAME THING.
Nope ;)
For all practical purposes they are equivelent but legally they are
completely different. You have SUN to thank for that ;)
>If one is a
>platform the other is a platform. Come on--this part is just common
>sense.
You would thinks so - but the legal system is not about common sense - it
is about the law ;)
>If I wrote an operating environment tomorrow, where would I apply
>to get it deemed a platform? Sun? GNU? I've got this great idea for
>a name for my new operating environment -- "Downloaded Code
>from Microsoft" -- but I'm not going to move forward until I'm sure I
>can run GNU utilities on it.
Well as long as any tools that are used by GNU utilities come as part of
environment then you can use them ;)
>Seriously, something gets to be a platform because it IS a
>platform, not because it has been "blessed."
nope.
>And if the J2EE APIs
>are a platform with the blessing, they are a platform without the
>blessing.
nope - they are a set of extentions that must be downloaded seperately and
are not part of platform.
> Unless there is language about blessing in the license,
>which of course there isn't.
The essential part is how you define os/compiler in a java environment.
Lawyers determined that this was anything that got downloaded in same
package as java runtime. You may try to argue otherwise thou I wouldn't bet
you would win ;)
Cheers,
Pete
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