From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 24369 invoked by alias); 16 Feb 2006 15:55:25 -0000 Received: (qmail 24359 invoked by uid 22791); 16 Feb 2006 15:55:23 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from xproxy.gmail.com (HELO xproxy.gmail.com) (66.249.82.204) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31) with ESMTP; Thu, 16 Feb 2006 15:55:22 +0000 Received: by xproxy.gmail.com with SMTP id i31so96737wxd for ; Thu, 16 Feb 2006 07:55:20 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.70.66.2 with SMTP id o2mr1184095wxa; Thu, 16 Feb 2006 07:55:20 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.70.109.9 with HTTP; Thu, 16 Feb 2006 07:55:20 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 15:55:00 -0000 From: Stuart Ballard To: GNU Classpath , mauve-discuss@sourceware.org Subject: Mauve license MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline Mailing-List: contact mauve-discuss-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: mauve-discuss-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2006-q1/txt/msg00026.txt.bz2 (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! 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... Stuart. PS I didn't include the Harmony list on this post mainly because my understanding is it's of absolutely no interest to them unless there *is* some way for Mauve to make this change. "GPL software is a nonstarter for us" is a quote I saw on the Harmony mailing list a couple of days ago... -- http://sab39.dev.netreach.com/