Re: Does J2SDK 5.0 BCL preclude contributions to Classpath?

[Matt Van Gundy]

Thanks for the pointer Robert,

It is a similar issue, however, the information you linked to didn't quite 
answer the question.  Because, my question concerns Sun's BCL rather than 
the SCSL, there is not issue of being tainted by having seen non-free 
source code.  I'm bothered by an item in the 5.0 BCL that says:

  "You may not create ... classes, interfaces, or subpackages that are in
  any way identified as 'java', 'javax', 'sun' or similar convention as
  specified by Sun in any naming convention designation."

Compare this to the verbiage from the 1.2 license:

  "[You] may not create ... __additional__ classes, interfaces, or 
  subpackages that are contained in the "java" or "sun" packages or 
  similar as  specified by Sun in any class file naming convention."
  (emphasis mine)

Unless I'm mistaken, it seems that the omission of the word "additional" 
could cause problems for 3rd party java class library implementations.  I 
don't know if it would be defensible in court, but I'd rather not agree to 
anything that might curtail my freedoms in what I may and may not 
implement later.  I tried googling for commentary and discussion on this, 
but so far, I've come up empty handed.

Thanks,
Matt

On Sun, 5 Jun 2005, Robert Schuster wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Hi Matt,
> have you seen this:
> http://developer.classpath.org/mediation/ClasspathFirstSteps#head-9d8423acc71a1bd7817642969981efd5331078d0
> 
> Is that answering your question?
> 
> cu
> Robert
>