Re: What are tainted developers allowed to work on?

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

Thanks for not letting some things drop on the floor Robert.
And thanks for putting up the references.

On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 09:38 +0100, Robert Schuster wrote:
> James Damour telled us some months ago that he had studied certain
> sources of the Sun JDK and is therefore considered a tainted developer
> which cannot contribute code to GNU Classpath.

Apologies to James. I kind of dropped the issue assuming you were happy
making sure MegaMek (http://megamek.sf.net/) would work fine with kaffe.
(Just tried the latest version with kaffe CVS and jamvm plus 0.13 and it
does start up, but it doesn't really work yet. There is an interesting
bug with widgets resizing when you move the window!?!)

> Nevertheless he is eager to help making Free Java a reality.

(Sidenote: we are not doing "Free Java", we are doing GNU Classpath, we
do not claim to be (free) Java (tm), although we hope we are compatible
with java so that people can easily move from a proprietary platform to
a free platform. Dalibor is working with Sun on getting kaffe to be
called Java, but that will be a long way off. If Sun helps out it might
be appropriate to claim we are doing Java, but currently we cannot even
claim to be compatible with it. [But Mauve and the Gump effort are a big
help here.])

> The problem is that we do not have a definite answer on what people
> like James may contribute (or at least this answer is not written
> down).

Of course it depends on the specific situation and the things people
want to work on. In general the rule is simple (as our FAQ says). When
working on code for GNU Classpath you should never ever refer in any way
to any proprietary implementation (see also my reply to the original
request quoted by Robert).

> It was said however that there are other parts on which tainted developers 
> may work:
> - Mauve test cases
> - Example programs for Classpath
> - Documentation fixes (on java[x]. or gnu. classes?)
> - Helper programs (e.g. japitools) and scripts

Yes, you can work on these things (as long as you don't study or copy
proprietary implementations for this). For example helping out on the
documentation is best done by studying the GNU Classpath implementation
and then describe (in a summary) what the code actually does. Or work
from a real world example of a program you want to write (say a small
webserver) and then explain hoe to use the classes in GNU Classpath to
make that happen and how to combine them. Something like gump
(http://brutus.apache.org/) that points out what kind of free
applications break on free environments is also highly appreciated.
Especially when there is someone around to make summaries of when/why
things stopped working or when they started working.

> Other things where we should find a resolution are:
> - May tainted developers contribute ideas on design decisions (on
> mailing-list/IRC)?
> - May tainted devs fix simple bugs (e.g forgotten imports that causes
> classpath compilation to fail or misspelled method names)

In general (if you haven't studied similar proprietary implementations
to get at that information) these activities are fine and appreciated.

> If we cannot find a solution on at least one of those points because
> of legal uncertainity whom do we have to ask then (FSF legal?)
> and who is doing the communication?

That should be me. I will ask FSF legal again if they have anything to
add to the above (or if I say something which is completely wrong) and
the summary you made of the discussion. Last time I asked there was not
a real definite answer except that there was nothing wrong with my
explanation of the situation.

> References:
> 
> Recent post by James Damour:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/2005-01/msg00005.html
> 
> James asking to clarify situation on Javadoc commits in June 2004:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/2004-06/msg00134.html
> 
> Mark's reply to James where he presents possible activities in the last 
> paragraph:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/2004-06/msg00135.html

Thanks. These are nice to have around.

Cheers,

Mark

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