Question about the SCA

[Antonio Cuni]

Hi all,

I am one of the core developer of PyPy_.

We are considering writing and sending a proposal about a backend for
`PyPy's JIT generator`_ targeting the JVM (and/or maybe the new Da
Vinci Machine).

I won't discuss the details of the proposal here because it is not
ready yet, but I would like a clarification about the Sun Contributor
Agreement, which you need to sign to enter the challenge, according to
the rules.

After having read it, I seem to understand that the Sun Contributor
Agreement applies only to the code that goes into a project directly
managed or owned by Sun; what it's not clear to me is how this
interacts with the projects that would eventually be sponsored by Sun
but are not directly managed by it, as in the case of our proposal,
for which the code developed would go into PyPy's codebase, which is
clearly not owned nor managed to Sun.

Our questions are:

1. Is it possible to enter the challenge even if the code being
    developed would be part of an existing project/codebase not directly
    related to Sun?

2. Does the Sun Contribution Agreement still apply also to that code?

3. (In case the answer to (2) is "yes") Which parts of the codebase
    will Sun have rights on? Only the new code developed under the terms
    of the challenge, even if that code it's not usable without the
    existing code? I hope that the Challenge does not require to give
    to Sun the rights over all the whole codebase, because it wouldn't be
    practical to find all the 70 existing developers of PyPy that currently
    hold the copyright of the various pieces of code.


Thanks,
Antonio

.. _PyPy: http://codespeak.net/pypy/
.. _`PyPy's JIT generator`: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/jit.html