OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21

[Fernando Cassia]

On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 7:05 PM, Dr Andrew John Hughes
<gnu_andrew at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> I also personally wouldn't contribute to non-copyleft projects either,
> something I already
> made clear years ago when Apache Harmony started, so whatever you are trying to
> imply with this comparison is flawed.

I don´t think my comparison is flawed.

Mozilla (the Mozilla Suite) was originally -and for a number of years-
released under a triple license: MPL/GPL/LGPL. This allowed Netscape
Corp to build a commercial browser (Netscape 6.0 to 7.2) on top of the
open source code, and package it with propietary code if they so
wanted (commercial spellchecker, or the AIM sidebar tab written in
XUL, etc).

So if you contributed to Mozilla.org, your code would not only end up
in the Mozilla 1.x browser suite, but also on Netscape 6.x - 7.x

Now, for some reason you say this approach irks you, and that you want
no piece of your contributions ending up in a commercial product with
a different license.

This is what I don´t understand. I never saw any Mozilla.org developer
complaining that their work would end up being part of the Netscape
6.x / 7.x browser. And that was my comparison.

you said "Making it part of OpenJDK under the OCA also means
contributing to Oracle's proprietary products and this is why I
personally would not make any
significant contribution of work (as in complete new features like
Mario mentions, rather than fixes) to OpenJDK."

Oracle is doing the same Mozilla did for years. Trying to build a
commercial product AND an open source project, both at the same time.
Why can´t they? After all, they´re the one putting incredible
resources (bandwidth, servers, and manpower, aka programmers on
Oracle´s payroll) to advance the project. Why can´t they set the rules
they see fit (like Mozilla) to have an open source project and
release, and a commercial product with a different license at the same
time?.

Please correct me if I´m wrong but you seem to be on a crusade against
multi-licensing, which is at the heart of many open source projects,
including QT, and asterisk, just to name two.

Regards,
FC