Re: Mauve license

[Andrew Haley <aph@gcc.gnu.org>]

Stuart Ballard writes:
 > (including the Classpath list as well as Mauve list here as I don't
 > know how many people actually read the mauve list)
 > 
 > Recently on the Harmony list there's been some discussion of how tests
 > should be written and where they should be put. I chimed in pointing
 > out what I thought would be a no-brainer - tests for public APIs
 > should be in Mauve of course.
 > 
 > I only just made that post and I haven't seen the responses yet, but
 > it occurred to me to look and see what Mauve's license is just to make
 > sure that wouldn't be a showstopper, and, well, as I'm sure many of
 > you know, it's GPL.
 > 
 > This is slightly strange to me. We (the Free Software community) are
 > forced to make our own test suite because Sun won't release theirs
 > under terms we can use, but when we do write our own, we put it under
 > a license that prevents even other Free Software projects from working
 > with it. Our test suite is under a stronger copyleft than Classpath
 > itself is!

Err, we created Mauve with a GNU licence because we're GNU
maintainers.  Hard as it may seem to believe, some of us *like* the
GPL.

 > I understand why we want Classpath itself to be copyleft. But what on
 > earth benefit are we getting from preventing people from
 > "proprietarizing" our testsuite?
 > 
 > My understanding is that a license change could be difficult to effect
 > at this point because I don't think a copyright assignment has been
 > required for Mauve contributions and therefore there are probably a
 > lot of copyright holders, some of whom may be difficult to track down.
 > But if it *could* be managed (and if the Harmony hackers could be
 > persuaded to put their tests there), I think it would be a major win
 > for everybody.
 > 
 > Mauve gets a bunch of new contributors (Harmony certainly seems to
 > have a fair bit of momentum at this point) and code (I believe some of
 > Harmony's big contributions came with test suites that could be
 > integrated).
 > 
 > Classpath and Harmony both get a bunch of new tests.
 > 
 > Harmony hackers get to see that Classpath hackers aren't inflexible
 > GPL-zealots, and both groups of hackers get used to working together
 > on a project that benefits both.
 > 
 > I don't think it's a coincidence that all the projects that originally
 > collaborated on Mauve ended up combining their class libraries,
 > either. Once people get used to working together, the level of
 > collaboration can only go up from there...

Sure.  But in the case of a test suite, none of us could think of a
reason not to use GPL.

Andrew.