Re: What are tainted developers allowed to work on?

[Chris Gray]

On Sunday 09 January 2005 20:25, Dalibor Topic wrote:

> Here's what's really happening: I'm preparing a 'qualified individual'
> application for a TCK scholarship for the J2SE 1.5 TCK for a
> Kaffe/classpath/... stack[2], in order to get unencumbered, non-tainting
> access to Sun's test suite. If and when that happens, and the terms of
> such access are clear and sound, I'll make sure to let people know. So
> far I was mostly busy with getting sick, and catching up with Kaffe
> development, rather then pushing in this direction, unfortunately ...

Interesting ... I started down the same road myself, but got sidetracked by 
the usual end-of-year rush (which ain't over yet). Time to take this up 
again. There's sufficient difference between our two projects that it will 
probably be interesting to compare the results.

In the meantime I did manage to elicit this statement from a Sun engineer,
while talking about something other than JCK:

        "Regarding independant VM's, people are free to use the Java
Specifications for R&D non-commercial use but as soon as they make use
of the code for commercial use then they have to take a license from
Sun.  The so called "CleanRoom" implementations of VM's are in fact not
clean as they are based on the Java Specification which is Sun's IP.
Therefore before making use of this commercially they should license
from Sun the test suites to ensure compliance."


> Part of that non-free software legal mess are trade marks, which is why
> I prefer not to use the term "Free Java" or similar idioms. I'd rather
> see Kaffe (and other free software runtimes) being referred to as free
> runtimes, to avoid the connotations that go with the term 'JVM' or 'Java'.

Isn't that kind of like referring to gcc as a "free compiler", without naming 
a language? For those for whom there is only One True Language that might 
seem unambiguous, but the rest of us might be confused and think you were 
working on a runtime for Ada or Occam or something.

Best wishes for 2005,

-- 
Chris Gray                      /k/ Embedded Java Solutions
Embedded & Mobile Java, OSGi        http://www.kiffer.be/k/
address@hidden                         +32 3 216 0369

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