Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 00:10:35 -0800 (PST) From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org> To: "Koster, K.J." <K.J.Koster@kpn.com> Cc: 'Aditya' <aditya@grot.org>, <freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: [press@apache.org: PRESS RELEASE: ASF Reaches Agreement with Sun to Allow Open Source Java Implementations] Message-ID: <20020326235727.B1335-100000@yez.hyperreal.org> In-Reply-To: <59063B5B4D98D311BC0D0001FA7E452205FDA4EA@l04.research.kpn.com>
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On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Koster, K.J. wrote: > Dear Adi, > > > > > > Apache Software Foundation Reaches Agreement With Sun Microsystems To > > > Allow Open Source Java Implementations > > > > I'm assuming this is good news for the FreeBSD native Java > > port but I'm not > > sure it helps any more than the work that the FreeBSD > > foundation has done over > > the last few months? Anyone have anything more excitingly > > postive to say about it? > > > While it's excellent news for Java on FreeBSD in general, it won't actually > help the porting effort much. The press release talks about new open source > projects and not ports of Sun's code base. Right. So here's the deal. What this does is "fix" the "bug" that legally prevented open source implementations of JCP-defined standards. Without going into a lot of details about spec licenses, Testing Conformance Kits, whether implementations of a spec are derivative works of that spec, etc., what this means is that *after* this is fixed, Java standards *might* now legally be implemented by open source software. I say *might* because a spec lead may still choose to put a license on the spec or TCK that prevents open source implementations, but Sun has promised not to do that for all the specs they lead (which is most, and all of the critical ones), and I doubt many of the others would do this either, since everyone else in the JCP's EC has been agitating for open source as well. Anyways, the litmus test is to watch the standards released after this week's promised changes to the JSPA (the constitution for the JCP) are made; for example, if the JDK 1.5 spec comes out and it allows open source implementations, then we will probably see real legal open source Java VMs out there. This should make the folks involved with Kaffe, JBoss, and other Java open source projects happy, as now they can exist without worrying about Sun's silver hammer coming down upon their heads at any time. This does *not* mean that Sun will automatically release their reference implementations or their own Java technology under open source licenses. I won't speculate at this point as to whether they will; there's no doubt in my mind, though, that someone else will do so. So, the porting work being done here with Sun's VM still might not go open source. There's always a hope, though. Brian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-java" in the body of the message
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