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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."

10 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Remember the old saying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Good programmer's copy, great programmer's steal!!"

    meh.. I got nothing.

  2. 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.

  3. Re:Any point? by heathm · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's exactly the problem. Geronimo is a project of the Apache Software Foundation and as such must be licensed under the ASF license. LGPL code cannont arbitrarily be relicensed.

  4. One questoin by TLouden · · Score: 5, Funny

    Which one is SCO and which is IBM, I'm a little slow on this stuff.

    --
    -Tim Louden
  5. 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.

    1. Re:Both sides seem to be handling it well by jimjag · · Score: 5, Informative

      JBoss has noticed similarities and has raised the issue (a second time) with Geronimo.

      Minor nit: This is actually the first time this was raised directly. Early on, the ASF was contacted by JBoss simply to "remind" us that JBoss is covered under GPL and that any derived code could not be relicensed (under the Apache License). At the time, no real work on Geronimo had been done so that there was no actual code that could be shown to be similar. The above leaves the impression that the ASF had ignored a previous notice from JBoss, which is certainly not the case.

  6. Common origin? by shamir_k · · Score: 5, Informative

    The first example in the letter is
    org.jboss.logging.XLevel vs. org.apache.geronimo.core.log.XLevel
    Both seem to be copied from log4j's examples.customLevel.XLevel
    However, there are much more substantial allegations made here

    --
    more about me
  7. Re:Even the variable names are the same by brett_sinclair · · Score: 5, Informative
    even choices for captialization are the same. for example, "ThreadNDCConverter"

    No mystery there. ThreadNDCConverter is capitalized *exactly* according to very established java code conventions. See for example http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/html/CodeConvent ions.doc8.html

  8. They should retract that statement by butane_bob2003 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The JBoss code and the Apache code both appear to be copied from an example that was originally created by Apache. Exibit A and B are both logging classes, both use Log4J (Apache's logging utility) and can be expected to be similar. Exibit C looks Almost identical, but not entirely. The similarities are so trivial, Apache is bound to make a few quick changes and be done with this thing before it starts. What sillyness.

    --


    TallGreen CMS hosting
  9. 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.