On the role of the SCA

[Andrew Haley]

On 09/05/11 10:55, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
> 
> 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.

That would be an alternative, but it's only because of the SCA that
it's even possible to talk about relicensing.

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

I have no idea what this means.

Andrew.