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GNU Classpath


From: jphamlore
Subject: GNU Classpath
Date: 12 May 2005 00:02:39 -0700
User-agent: G2/0.2

The GNU Classpath website

http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/faq/faq.html

is full of violations of the published guidelines for use of Sun
trademarks:

http://www.sun.com/policies/trademarks/.

The trademarks should never be used as nouns or in possessives, but GNU
Classpath's web site does that all over the place.

The GNU Classpath project takes great care in establishing that
developers are clean with respect to not having read the
implementation's source code--but should developers also be clean from
having read the API specification?  The API's license file specifically
says that nothing other than internal usage of the specification is
allowed except for complete implementations that pass the required
conformance tests.  Perhaps for now the GNU Classpath project can claim
that it is a pre-release product, but how will that evasion apply five
or ten years from now?  Besides, the GNU Classpath project claims that
public release 1.0 will only implement a subset of the 1.2 API
specification.  Picking and choosing to implement only a subset one
finds convenient has been proven in the past to draw legal ire.

I don't see how there can ever be an official public release.  But how
long can that dodge that GNU Classpath isn't an official release be
maintained without it's lack being merely seen as a legal evasion,
especially if some free software comes to depend on it?  Since the Free
Software Foundation's Massachusetts address is splashed across the
bottom of the web page, who's going to come forward to implement areas
of the specification that are possibly covered by patents not under
control of the specification's creator, even if the patents would only
be enforced in the United States?


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