Re: JINI clone

[Bill Petheram]

I'll answer the e-mails in one!

Anthony Green wrote:
> 
> Hi Bill -
> 
>         I think JINI is outside the mandate of the Classpath project, but I 
> think
> we could use it in the gcj distribution (http://sources.redhat.com/java).
>  Would you be willing to assign the copyright over to the Free Software
> Foundation?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> AG

I guessed that it was but this was the only place I knew to contact. I
am happy to assign the copyright.


Paul Fisher wrote:
> 
> Brian Jones <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Short answer, yes we'd be interested.  Long answer is legal issues may
> > keep it from being useful.
> 
> Last I checked (and this was a while ago), Sun had patents which would
> prevent the implementation/distribution/use of a free implementation
> of JINI.
> 

The SCSL has changed recently. It now seems to mean that I can use JINI
without legal issues here at HP. I did the clone outside of HP because I
wanted to explore JINI ideas.

I don't know what patents Sun has over JINI. The license says that any
clone may infringe IP. There are a couple of things in JINI that are not
possible with the current JDK. I have not implemented these. I decided
anyway that I wanted my clone not to replace JINI but to be able to
write JINI services for my own systems. A bit like Ninja RMI.

I also tried to contact FSF about the legal issues but haven't heard
anything.

I originally contacted exolab who were doing the Wizard project. No work
had been done on this and then it was canned anyway.

thanks

bill