Public open specs

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Dalibor,

On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 16:09 +0200, Dalibor Topic wrote:
> Mark Wielaard wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 19:55 +0200, Dalibor Topic wrote:
> >   
> >> Not yet (outside the JSR spec document). The process bottleneck is
> >> identified, working on a fix.
> >
> > That is great! Any timelines for these process fixes to be cleared up?
> >   
> Unfortunately, I don't yet have a timeline, though the work on a fix is
> ongoing.

Thanks, please keep us informed.

> > I came up with the following list of JSRs that have
> > a Sun lead and for which OpenJDK provides (prototype) GPL code, but
> > which are published under non-free terms preventing others to also
> > publish (independent) implementations or extend the OpenJDK provided
> > ones:
> >   
> Could you elaborate why you think that the terms of the JSRs you quoted
> prevent publication of
> independent implementations?

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