Public open specs

[Dalibor Topic]

Mark Wielaard wrote:
> 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.
>   
Great, than I'll continue poking around there, and report back as I hear
more. Thank you for your patience, and
continued friendly reminders, I really appreciate them.
>   
>>> 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, ...'). 
That does not seem to be a GPL compatibility issue to me.

Could you elaborate why you believe that to be the case?
> 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.").
>   

Is there a specific legal analysis backing up that argument you can
point me to, or is that your
personal opinion? The reason why I'm asking is that a claim of a
fundamental GPL incompatibility of
JSR spec licensing seems to be quite extraordinary on the face of
existence of successful GPL licensed
implementations so far, including those done by Red Hat, JBoss,
ObjectWeb and others, for example.

If what you have is your personal non-lawyerly opinion, than that's
cool, too - but in that case I'd suggest
focusing the argument for spec license changes on more promising aspects
- the GPL incompatibility
argument is not really a great tool for me to work with in face of a lot
of GPLd code successfully
implementing JSRs showing the opposite.

cheers,
dalibor topic

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