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Re: Help needed to persuade apaches about the Classpath license.


From: Leo Simons
Subject: Re: Help needed to persuade apaches about the Classpath license.
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 00:06:20 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (X11/20050404)

IANAL.

Meskauskas Audrius wrote:
> Maybe you could help me to persuade that folk?

At the moment the policy with regard to GPL+Classpath Exception @ the
ASF is that it is not approved for use within ASF works, and policy
remains like that until it changes. (Which is still being worked on.)

Until that time, no amount of persuasion is going to help in dealing
with the geronimo stuff since in order to pass the J2EE TCK they must
include a CORBA impl in their distribution and they're not allowed to do
so according to ASF policy.

In other words, the geronimo developers aren't the crew to convince.

Third parties probably should not have a lot of problems with replacing
the CORBA implementation that geronimo uses with something else and
distributing that, but it can't be called "J2EE" and I believe can't be
called "geronimo" either.

Harmony is in a different situation. It is basically stalling on many
fronts waiting for resolution of legal issues. I have no idea whether
Geronimo would want to do the same.

Mark wrote:
> In theory there should be no persuading needed since the Apache
> hackers have already said that they would like to use GNU Classpath as
> core library for the Harmony initiative and that the license is in
> principle not a problem for adoption.

Just for the record, that is not an official ASF viewpoint.

> The main thing holding things
> back is that you need more then just the core class libraries for
> building a full free j2se replacement.

The main (only) thing holding us back from actually using Classpath
within Harmony is the legal/licensing mess. If Classpath were under the
Apache License or the MIT License or the BSD License or the MPL 1.1 or
<insert-a-for-apache-less-controversial-license-x> we would probably
have code in Apache SVN already linking to it.

> That said in practise it seems persuading is needed and is not simple.
> As Dalibor pointed out a while ago [1] the Apache group has a strong
> tradition of debating and seeking consensus through various
> committees.

Dalibor exaggerated. I thought it was funny :-)

We tend to have "lazy consensus" (which is very similar to JFDI) for
most things. Just not legal stuff.

> No decisions seem to be made unless at least three
> committees have agreed on a common position/view.

Now, that is simply not the case. In the case of legal matters, no big
decision is made without consulting legal counsel, and then in the end
the ASF board and the ASF board alone makes a decision based on that
legal counsel (and advice and input from many other parties, most
importantly our Vice President of Legal Affairs, Cliff Schmidt).

What "hackers" agree upon "in principle" simply is not sufficient in
these matters -- if we care and agree then that just means we invest
time and try and ask our lawyers to help us fix things.

Just like Classpath follows FSF counsel advice, Geronimo follows ASF
counsel advice. From my experience, the legal processes at the FSF
aren't more agile than the ones at the ASF at all. It seems legal
processes aren't agile anywhere.

Has nothing to do with committees or consensus. Has to do with lawyers
and the law.


cheers!


LSD




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