Re: Java development on debian ppc
"Ean R . Schuessler" <ean@brainfood.com> writes:
> On Tue, Jul 04, 2000 at 11:00:18PM -0700, Per Bothner wrote:
> > The license for the documentation is:
> > http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/relnotes/SMICopyright.html
> > Now that license does have some problems, but that is another discussion.
>
> Well, even that isn't particularly clear.
Yes - as I said the license does have some problems.
First, it is not clear whether the license has any legal meaning at all.
It is publicly available documentation, and I don't know how they
could legally restrict someone from using it to build a clean-room
implementation. I.e. are they just permitting us to do something
we can do anyway? (And of course the legal status of reverse
engineering varies from country to country.)
> First, the documentation states that your implementation must neither
> subset nor superset their implementation. This raises interesting problems
> if they have a patent on anything in their implementation, you wouldn't be
> able to eliminate it and you wouldn't have a license to use it so you
> couldn't comply.
There is also the all-or-nothing problem: No subsetting implies a
huge initial hurdle. I think we can reasonable interpret this as
referring to no subsetting of *indivual classes*. We can also
say that our *goal* is to implement the whole damn spec, but we
have to do one chunk at a time.
> They also state that you must pass all their test suites, however you can't
> get these lovely test suites unless you are a licensee. I'm not clear how
> one could comply with this requirement either.
I could argue the onus is on Sun: If we don't have access to the
test-suite, we can't verify compliance. However, our *goal* is
to comply, and if any discrepencies are pointed out, we will
attempt to fix the problem, to the extent of our abilities.
--
--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com http://www.bothner.com/~per/
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