Re: OpenJDK draft trademark license

[Walter Landry <wlandry@caltech.edu>]

Mark Reinhold <mr@Sun.COM> wrote:
> > Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:59:24 -0700 (PDT)
> > From: Walter Landry <wlandry@caltech.edu>
> 
> >    ...  My main concern is that section (1) seems to only allow
> > portability fixes, and only for efforts that are an "approved project
> > hosted in the OpenJDK Community".  Does that mean that Debian can not
> > independently issue new releases which fix security issues?  While
> > Debian will strive to work with the OpenJDK community to resolve these
> > issues, Debian can not rely upon upstream to fix these bugs for them.
> > That was the main source of contention behind the firefox/iceweasel
> > dispute.
> 
> It's definitely not Sun's intent here to forbid downstreams from doing
> their own security fixes.  Most (all?) security fixes tend to be small
> in terms of lines of code affected, and the "vast majority" phrasing
> does allow a complementary "tiny minority" of code to be different for
> unspecified reasons, so I think they're already allowed by the current
> language.

Ok.  It is just that section 1a makes it seem like the only changes
(as opposed to omissions) allowed are portability changes made by an
approved project.  Might I suggest a simplification of section 1 to

  (1) Either

      (a) The Software is a substantially complete implementation of
          the OpenJDK development-kit or runtime-environment source
          code retrieved from a single Website, and the vast majority
          of the Software code is identical to that upstream Original
          Software, or

      (b) The Software is a combination of a Virtual Machine from one
          Website combined with the Library and Tools of another
          Website, so long as the vast majority of the code in each is
          identical to the corresponding upstream Virtual Machine or
          Library and Tools component.

I do not think that the section on portability fixes is really needed,
since, even with portability fixes, I would expect that the vast
mojority of the code would be the same.

This is not a critical change, since you are going to put a
clarification in the FAQ.  But it would be better to clear it up in
the license.

Thanks,
Walter Landry
wlandry@caltech.edu