Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

2 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. XLevel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The first exhibit seems to be originally derived from:

    http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/jakarta-log4j/ ex amples/customLevel/XLevel.java

    which is apache licensed in the first place.

  2. Not copied? by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Looking at the code as a programmer, some things stand out:

    1. The "copying" JBoss claims doesn't fit. There's differences in braces, keywords and other things that wouldn't be accounted for by automatic reformatting of code. I can't see a programm who's copying code directly going back in and doing that kind of editing. I'd expect braces to be maintained, for example, yet in several places they aren't.
    2. The similar names are obvious names for types, variables and functions. Given the same spec to start from, without having seen the JBoss code at all, I'd pick the same names.
    3. The places they cite as having code-structure similarity are very simple. Frankly, it looks to me like there's only one sane way to write that code.
    It can't hurt to do a check, but I suspect JBoss is seeing copying where there's just only one obvious way to do something and most programmers, working independently, will make basically the same set of choices for that code.