Re: Free jsr reference implementations?

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Per,

On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 12:32 -0800, Per Bothner wrote:
> I just got off the phone with the spec lead (Mike Grogan) for JSR 223, which
> I've been a litle bit involved with.  We'd like to find a way to license
> the Reference Implementation under an acceptable classpath-compatible license.
> Some Prior Art may be helpful in convincing the Sun powers-that-be.

Nice! Thanks for helping with this effort. I hope this works out. It
would be really good to have GPL compatible free reference
implementations of JSRs.

> * Which existing JSR have classpath-compatible RIs?  Maybe JAXP?
> * Which of these, if any, are shipped as part of J2SE or J2EE?

I don't really follow the JSRs or the JCP that closely. Sadly most
documents produced by the JCP are behind click-wraps that we cannot use
when working on GNU Classpath without FSF legal approval. But packages
that are free software and seem to be also part of some J2SE/J2EE
implementations are:

Things we ship as external packages:
- org.w3c.dom (see classpath/external/w3c_dom README)
- org.sax (see classpath/external/sax README)

Implementations which we don't ship, which are free software, but for
which we have different implementations:

- javax.xml
  We have our own implementation of course from the GNU JAXP project.
  There is also an Apache project implementing these.
  As far as I know they get code drops from Sun soon after they ship
  a new version. This is distributed under the Apache Software License.

- javax.servlet
  GNU Paperclips comes with its own LGPL implementation.
  But again there is an Apache project (probably part of Tomcat) that
  has an implementation and gets code drops from Sun from time to time
  distributed under the Apache Software Licence.

(There are now finally talks between FSF and ASF to get some things
cleaned up. No promisses that this works out. It sounds good. But please
don't use the Apache license at this moment for stuff that you want to
get integrated into official GNU projects.)

- java.util.concurrent (see below)

> * Which of these, if any, have Sun as the Spec Lead?

As far as I know the jaxp and servlet ones have.

> My understanding is Doug Lea worked hard on getting the new concurrency
> framework Free, but didn't quite manage it.  It might be useful to get
> his story too.

Doug Lea his expert group publishes everything (including TCK) as free
software on sourceforge. Everything his expert group publishes has a
public domain dedication. There are however a few (2 or 3) files derived
from SCSL covered source code. These files are clearly marked. We would
need to rewrite those before we could import them into GNU Classpath.
The main problem now is that the java.util.concurrent is now using
generics. And we don't do generics very well yet. Recently someone made
a backport though. We could look into using this for the moment. But
just getting the generics work finished is the long term plan.

Doug and I emailed a bit in the past about getting these also freed.
Doug did the communication with Sun legal and I with FSF legal. This
took much time and didn't reach a satisfactory result. The mistake we
made was not getting the legal people to talk directly to each other. In
the end that made the excersise with us two as intermediaries too
resource/time consuming. We went through 3 or 4 drafts but it wasn't
clear that Sun would actually release those files really under free (GPL
compatible) terms. During this discussion the code base was also
converted to generics and since we didn't have any free compiler at that
time we/I decided to drop it and resume the discussion (or just rewrite
those few files) when we had proper generics support.

Lessons learned:
- Make sure that when you think you have an agreement about things to
get the laywers to talk directly to each other so you don't have to
translate back and forth.
- Make sure no part of your implementation of an JSR is derived from
non-free or non-GPL-compatible sources.

Cheers,

Mark

P.S. I will be away for a couple of days. Expect delays in replies.
 
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