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JBoss Queries Apache Geronimo Code Similarity

Posted by simoniker on from the tomahawks-at-dawn dept.

Kanagawa writes "This morning, Jim Jagielski, Exec. V.P. and Secretary of the Apache Software Foundation, announced on the geronimo-dev mailing list that 'the ASF received a letter from JBoss's lawyers regarding... the similarity of code between [J2EE implementation] Geronimo and JBoss.' The letter is available in PDF. According to the letter, similarities were noticed back in July, and haven't been fixed."

4 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Doesn't really look that much the same by hazem · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm no expert coder, but these don't look the same to me. There are similarities, but one would presume they are doing the similar things.

    One of the functions is to convert an integer to a level. How many different ways could you do actually do this? Another function converts a string.

    If you assign a class to write functions that would change variable types. All 30 people will come up with different code, but the code is likely to look very similar - especially if you're encouraging them to use proper function/variable naming and comments.

    Kudos to JBoss for posting the code, but I don't see much here to be suing over.

  2. Both sides seem to be handling it well by burgburgburg · · Score: 5, Insightful
    JBoss has noticed similarities and has raised the issue (a second time) with Geronimo.

    Geronimo has requested that all developers confirm that either a) they didn't just submit JBoss code or b) they had the right as the original creators of the JBoss code section to also submit it to Geronimo.

    No FUD. No hyperbole in extremis. No crazed threats. Oh, wait: No SCO. Of course. What a breath of fresh air.

  3. Okay... by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I'm not clear about whether you really violated somebody's copyright if you looked at an LGPLed work and followed the same basic design structure to write your own work. I mean, the many instances of things like bean accessors/mutators having the same names and basic implementations are endemic to Java. Then there's stuff like logging based on other Apache licensed work.


    It does sound like there were a few particular instances where a class' design and the set of methods in the class were directly patterned on the JBoss design - not necessarily copied line-by-line, but the solution to a fundamental part of the J2EE specification "problem" was ripped from JBoss and modified to suit the code needs of Geronimo. Whether this is violation of copyright or not is a tough question. Copyright doesn't protect a design pattern, a solution to a problem, the logical organization of a set of objects, or an algorithm. Proving that somebody actually violated copyright in this case seems rather hard to me - though perhaps a bit of credit to the JBoss folks for their thoughts and design work is in order.

  4. Re:Even the variable names are the same by Merk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    C'mon! CamelCase names in Java follow a some simple rules, there's even a documented way of how you're supposed to do it. As for CELLPADDING, since that's how it's named in HTML, it wouldn't surprise me to see it done identically in another place. Better go sue Netscape too.

    To see if the code is actually similar you'd have to look at algorithms and innovations. Looking at interfaces and their names isn't going to tell you anything at all.