Public open specs

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Dalibor,

On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 23:41 +0100, Dalibor Topic wrote:
> > That was just an example. 
> Ok. That's the one thing I am looking at, anyway, as it seems to be the
> most promising one to me (the JVM spec
> has been published for a long time without clickthroughs), in particular
> in letting me get an idea how the whole J*
> acronym system works.

Yes, getting these things published without any click-through licenses
would indeed be really good.

> > Ultimately getting all the specs for which Sun holds the copyrights under
> > non-restricting terms compatible with the GPL would of course be the
> > goal.
> >   
> I don't think I really understand what terms you believe to be to be
> incompatible with the GPL.

I believe these were mentioned a couple of times in our discussion
already. There are currently restrictions on the JSRs that prevent
reusing any Sun OpenJDK code for implementations because they aren't
considered "independent" because of clause 5 ('"Independent
Implementation" shall mean an implementation of the Specification that
neither derives from any of Sun's source code or binary code
materials, ...'). And even for "independent" implementations clauses 2
(a - c) limit the scope of the code you can publish, which conflicts
with the rights granted under the GPL, which doesn't limit the scope
("does not modify, subset, superset, etc.").

Cheers,

Mark