On the role of the SCA

[Mario Torre]

Il giorno lun, 09/05/2011 alle 10.23 +0100, Andrew Haley ha scritto:
> 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.
> 
> Andrew.

I support this, although I think the terms of the OCA [1] should be made
nicer to attract contributions. We have joint Copyright assignment on
GNU Classpath too, and this one was never a problem, if a better and
clear wording is used, especially resolving the unbalanced symmetry on
the deal, I'm sure we will have no more issues to accept it as well.

Cheers,
Mario

[1] which in Italian means duck :)
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