result of IBM Jikes conference call
IBM staff and I discussed the Jikes license in a conference call on
December 10. I brought up all of the problem areas that I found and
that people on the net communicated to me, even those that would not
effect whether or not Jikes complies with the Open Source(TM) Definition.
They said that some of the license problems are not their intent and
expressed a willingness to clear them up. They say they are working on
making the parser generator Open Source. Their concerns are not giving
away IBM's entire patent portfolio to large companies who incorporate a
single line of Jikes in their software, and not fragmenting the Java
language. They are going to get more community feedback for several
weeks through a Jikes-license mailing list, and they will need some time
to discuss what they are doing and to prepare licenses.
Their attorney warned that licenses get longer when you try to make them
"friendly" by avoiding legal jargon, but he accepted that the programmers
who would contribute to Jikes should not have to consult a lawyer for
interpretation before they mail in a patch.
The list of topics I brought up is attached to the end of this announcement.
If you want to bring up other topics or discuss these, IBM is creating a
Jikes-license discussion forum at http://www.research.ibm.com/jikes/ .
Thanks
Bruce Perens
By order of the Open Source Initiative Board
Things I brought up:
0. Title:
Need a (TM) after "Open Source".
1. Definitions:
* Definition of licensed code is over-restrictive in that it limits the
license to Java 1.1 compilers.
2. Grant of Rights:
* Paragraph one, the copyright license, appears to restrict the
distribution of modified works to the point that those rights are
granted _only_ by paragraph two, the patent license. This is because
the words at the end of the paragraph, "the Program as distributed by
IBM", belong after "prepare derivative works of" and not where they
are in the paragraph. This increases the effect of the 60% language in
paragraph two to effect the copyright license as well as the patent
license.
* Paragraph two last sentence is unparseable and appears to negate the
rest of the paragraph.
* Paragraph three last sentence is unparseable and appears to negate the
rest of the paragraph.
* Paragraph four gives right to terminate due to any intellectual-property
suit at all, even one not related to Jikes or the patents used in Jikes.
5. Termination:
Too broad. Potential for termination due to any frivilous claim exists.
There should be a possibility to terminate an individual contribution
because of a valid claim without causing all contributions and IBM's
initial grant to terminate. IBM should lose right to contributions if
it terminates. Is there the possibility of a Contributor losing a
significant investment that they have made in Jikes modification in
case of termination?
Parser generator:
Parser generator used to build Jikes is not Open Source.
--
The $70 Billion US "budget surplus" hardly offsets our $5 Trillion national
debt. The debt increased by $133 Billion in the same year we found a
"surplus".
Bruce Perens K6BP bruce@pixar.com 510-620-3502 NCI-1001
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