Viner, David wrote:
> does that mean that the code is *not* copyrighted by Sun?
>
> dave
Well, it means things are inconclusive, given that the only public
statement on XNode from a Sun employee (me, at that time), was in
an erroneous statement about it being based on code copyrighted
by Sun, which it wasn't. It was developed while I was an employee
at Sun, but it wasn't copyrighted by Sun.
Copyright law in the US requires publication. You can put a copyright
notice on something but it has no validity until you actually publish
it somewhere, i.e., you can't claim right of copyright in a court of
law until publication. Now, to my knowledge, Sun has never made public
anything about XNode (other than the name of com.sun.xnode.*.class
files), and I can only find reference to it on Sun's site(s) in user-
submitted messages asking about exception handling, etc. The XNode API
was apparently not consequential enough to warrant any public notice.
The com.sun.xnode.* class files are still part of the JWSDP distribution,
as is the Indri Xindice access tool I wrote.
I actually published something about XNode before they ever did,
as I've published the XNode API as part of Ceryle's documentation.
Given that "XNode" exists as a name in a bunch of places (2,030 found
on Google), only the name "com.sun.xnode" could be considered Sun's.
"org.apache.xnode" as a name is by definition Apache's, and Sun can't
publish things under someone else's name (which is why XNode never got
published while I was at Sun -- I left before the donation happened,
so they couldn't use "org.apache.xnode"). The "XNode" name is not
trademarked by Sun nor anyone else. It'd be difficult to do given
the wide use of the term.
The real issue here isn't really copyright or trademark but
intellectual property. There's not a lot of intellectual property in
the API, but one could say the same about SAX. An API is only good if
people use it, and if Sun won't release the API it will die. I can
create a different API that has much of the same functionality (or
more!) and publish that API to Apache directly from KMi, since my
studentship here doesn't require I give up my IPR to the university.
Sadly, newer students than me are under a different contract, and
now do not own the rights to their own work. As I said, I hate the
influence of lawyers, even in academia.
I'm going to send a message off to Sun's feedback address to see what
can be done. If they don't reply or aren't willing to release the API
to Apache, I'll make a new API. There's no patent on the API so there's
nothing stopping me from creating a new one. Given that to my knowledge
nobody at Sun is doing anything to keep this from being donated, there's
just nobody doing the donating, hopefully this can be easily resolved.
I don't think there's anything malicious at work here; it's just a
question of finding a willing party to do some work on our behalf.
The irony of this is that I developed XNode specifically for donation
to Apache, for my own project related to Lee Iverson's NODAL (i.e., not
something related to work I was doing at Sun), and I talked my team at
Sun into using XNode as part of the registry server project. I hope I'm
not in the end excluded from using the API due to the current circumstances.
All of the brains about XNode is in the implementation, not the API, and
the code I'm using in my Ceryle project is completely different than the
code in Sun's Indri (which I wrote for them). So it'd be a shame to not
release the API, as it has little utility outside of use with Xindice.
Hopefully.
Murray
...........................................................................
Murray Altheim http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK .
"Shhh. Be vewy, vewy quiet. We're hunting wabbits." -- Elmer Fudd
"I don't know how close we are, closer than we were yesterday,
I guess. All I know is we're on the hunt." -- George W. Bush
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