On the role of the SCA

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

>

snip...

>> As I mentioned in the previous thread, much of this could be sorted
>> out if Oracle simply cleaned up their binaries so that there was a
>> clear GPL component with proprietary blobs to plug in.  That's both
>> technically and legally possible AFAICS, but it does require a little
>> work initially.  The benefit far outweighs this initial outlay though,
>> as you'd be able to get rid of the OCA
>
> I don't think you would.  I don't think it would make any difference
> to the core issue, as I described above.  Improvements to the VM, for
> example, can't be separated into proprietary blobs.
>

Ok, so what you're actually saying is not that you couldn't drop the OCA
in such a situation, but that you couldn't get to such a situation in the first
place because the necessary prerequisite of separating the proprietary
blobs isn't possible.

On that, I can only make superstitions.  Only Oracle know what they bundle
with their proprietary VM that's not part of OpenJDK.

>> and actually start to make OpenJDK into a proper FOSS project.
>
>> It goes a bit further than making "free software developers feel
>> better" and actually removes a huge barrier for entry into the
>> project.
>
> It does, but this is insignificant when compared with the problems
> that would be caused by forking.  The question is simply whether the
> pain of maintaining a non-proprietary fork would be justified by the
> amount of new software that would be contributed.
>

Either way, you'll get forks.  For me, the current status quo actually
works fine, with OpenJDK as an upstream and real work going on in
IcedTea.  It means OpenJDK naturally fails at being the single source
of Free Java development though, which I get the impression some
people seem to want.

>
> Andrew.
>



-- 
Andrew :-)

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