When the Sun goes down - what happens to the OpenJDK?

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Volker,

Thanks for starting this debate.

On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 10:53 +0200, Volker Simonis wrote:
> Now that the Sundown is getting closer, I would like to start a
> discussion about various formal and legal aspects of the OpenJDK
> project. In the past years, since Sun has open sourced its Java SE
> reference implementation under the GPL, formal, legal and
> organisational aspects have always been somehow "pushed aside" with
> the argument that establishing a running infrastructure and a vibrant
> community has precedence.

In general I do think that was a good choice given the limited
resources. Rules without people don't make a healthy community. But you
are right that it seems to have resulted in no progress on the
formalistic governance setup, which is indeed a little disappointing. On
the other hand we seem to have various publicly active people now around
the OpenJDK code base, not just from Sun, but also from various
different corporations and various individuals.

> This has manifested itself in various shortcomings in the legal and
> organisation status of the project:
> [...]
> - applying for the "OpenJDK Community TCK License" is still obscure:
> one has to sign the SCA in order to be eligible but nevertheless Sun
> still reserves one's rights to decide to whom the license is granted.

And more importantly, the TCK itself is still proprietary software
hidden behind an NDA which makes the community as a whole unable to
cooperate publicly on the compatibility story. We have to rely on good
Samaritans like Red Hat, which accept such NDAs and do testing behind
closed doors without full community involvement.

> - what about the signed "Sun Contributor Agreements" - will they still
> be valid (ICA, OCA, HPCA, ... :)?

According to the Sun FAQ there are no guarantees in the SCAs that in
case of a takeover an acquiring party will honor any transferred rights:
http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/contributor_agreement.jsp#r_5

Neither are there any guarantees that I can see in the OpenJCK agreement
that it won't be terminated after a year.

All the copyright, distribution and patent rights granted under the GPL
by any party (re)distributing the code base once distributed don't
terminate, except if you act in breach of its requirements for providing
full source code of course.

> Probably nobody will be able to answer these questions now and exactly
> therefore I think that it is crucial for the future of the OpenJDK to
> base the project on a more solid ground. One of the most important
> aspects in my opinion is to somehow grant OpenJDK implementers a
> permanent and irrevocable right to use current AND future TCKs in
> order to certify their OpenJDK implementations as "Java compatible"!

The OpenJCK license agreement doesn't grant you any trademark rights
(and I believe Sun claims to have a trademark on the phrase "Java
compatible"). As far as I know there is no public agreement granting
such trademark rights.

But besides naming I agree that we should make sure to get a some free
compatibility kit. The problem here is the JCP which grants Sun[/Oracle]
special rights with respect to the platform TCKs. Hopefully a JSR for
Java7 isn't accepted without making sure that the platform TCK is also
available as free software.

Of course the TCK is just a small piece in the compatibility picture. In
the end the jtreg suite, mauve and running real applications are
probably more important to guard the compatibility promise.

Cheers,

Mark