[OpenJDK Rasterizer] Rasterizer replacement proposal

[Mark Wielaard]

On Tue, 2007-06-12 at 21:26 +0200, Roman Kennke wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> 
> > >    I don't think it's Sun only policy, pretty much any company has it.
> > >    It is easy to become tainted by looking at other's people code.
> > >    The fact that the code is open-source doesn't matter, since
> > >    it's a question of copyright.
> > 
> > Note that the copyright isn't in question in this case since it all comes from
> > GNU Classpath. It is exactly the same as OpenJDK is already using (GPL +
> > classpath) and you can be sure that the FSF made sure sure all that code is as
> > clean as can be. They are kind of pedantic about that :)
> 
> Yeah, but it's still copyrighted by the FSF. I think this is the
> problem. It really doesn't matter from a legal POV if the license is the
> same. License != copyright owner. Copying FSF code would be copyright
> infringing, regardless of the actual license.

No, copying FSF code is (by definition, since it will always be Free
Software) never a problem as long as the free software distribution
terms are followed and the actual copyright notice itself is retained on
the copy. Then it isn't copyright infringement since you have explicit
rights to do the copying. just like you have the right to copy and
redistribute with or without changes the rest of the OpenJDK source code
since that is distributed under the same terms. Both projects (GNU
Classpath see the LICENSE, OpenJDK see the README_THIRD_PARTY files)
already contain "external" code from other copyright holders that is
distributed with the larger work, for which everybody has the right to
redistribute. That is the beauty of Free Software licenses :)

Cheers,

Mark