On the role of the SCA

[Geir Magnusson Jr.]

On May 9, 2011, at 5:23 AM, Andrew Haley wrote:

> Taking this off the governing board thread:
> 
> On 28/04/11 11:30, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> 
>> - Get rid of the SCA. Commit to using the GPL for everything.
>>  People should be able to be members of the community without
>>  having to assign all their rights on non-reciprocal terms to
>>  Oracle.
> 
> Personally, I think this would be a disaster for free Java.  Oracle
> would continue their proprietary projects, making improvements to the
> JDK, but would have to firewall contributions from the wider community
> to make sure that they didn't get in to the proprietary JDK tree.  So,
> the OpenJDK and JDK trees would have to be isolated from each other.
> Any contributions from the community that were needed in the
> proprietary tree would have to be rewritten.  The end result would
> surely be that OpenJDK would be orphaned, and would wither without
> Oracle's contributions.  It might make free software developers feel
> better, but it would push users back to using proprietary Java.

I think you're right.

If people contributed to OpenJDK under a license that had modern patent language as well as the ability for ORCL to relicense in it's product suite, that would eliminate the need for the SCA.

Obviously, that would eliminate the ability for ORCL to control what others do with the software, but Freedom has its price I suppose.

geir