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

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Fri, 2005-08-12 at 00:06 +0200, Leo Simons wrote:
> Third parties probably should not have a lot of problems with replacing
> the CORBA implementation that geronimo uses with something else

That is probably the way forward then for now.
Just getting geronimo building and running on one of the free stacks is
a good thing anyway. And since we once had jboss (although not a current
version) and now jonas working this should in principle not be that hard
to get going.

> 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.

That is just because there is no official ASF viewpoint at this time it
seems. But it is what the harmony hackers have expressed as their view.

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

Just for the record I thought it funny too. And as you say it is
painfully true at times also for FSF/GNU projects.

> 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).

Cliff (and David on the FSF side) are doing an amazing job.

I am probably just a bit frustrated that we as harmony have to deal with
the ASF politics while when we started we wanted a project that was
above all parties. Just hackers producing results. I jumped in with that
in mind and got a bit of a cold shower when things turned out not to be
mainly about combining the amzing amount of code and results of the
existing projects but more about ASF legalize. It will probably turn out
fine in the end, but boy does it take a long time to reach consensus
that cooperation is a good thing and that we shouldn't be blinded by any
(perceived) legal issues and just move forward for now.

> 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.

:) Now there I can agree.

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

At times I am afraid the laywers and the law are used as stop energy by
free software communities that need an excuse to not work more closely
together.

Cheers,

Mark

-- 
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