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Open Source And Closed Standards?
jaaron writes "Can open source and closed standards work together? That's the question asked by Kevin Bedell in his O'Reilly weblog article. The issue springs from questions on an OSI mailing list, hinting that Sun Microsystems is looking for an open source license that would require derivatives to maintain test suite compatibility. Under such a scheme Sun could maintain control of the Java API but allow open implementations."
Possibly.
It depends on just how "closed" the closed-source component of the partnership is. If it's something like Java, which is mostly open in its technological aspects, but legally closed, and there is an undertaking from the owner that there will be no GIF-style schenanigans, then why not?
On the other hand, if we're talking about, say, the MS Word "standard", then I just don't think that a partnership with Open Source is possible. There's no real reason why an Open Source project would need to use such a standard anyway, so I think the answer probably has to be "probably not"
you have to pass the test suite to call your implementation Ada.
That hasn't been true for a long time; I don't believe it was ever true for Ada95.
The GNU Ada Translator (GNAT) passes just fine.
That's half true. There exists a version of GNAT, several years old, that on a one (a small group?) of systems, again several years old, it has been certified to pass. There is a much larger group of systems and versions that it passes on, although it's never been checked officially. As for the versions that many distributions ship based on GCC 3.x, they generally don't pass all the tests.
This is exactly how OpenGL works.
...) All non-standard extensions just can't begin with glXYZ(). Official extensions begin with ARB_XYZ and in the next version(s), they turn into glXYZ() once they have been formaly approved.
There is an open published standard that any developer can use for free or non-free software. For OpenGL implementations, they have some sort of dual-licensing. FOSS operating systems have a free (free beer) license. However closed source implementations have to pay a fee.
No matter what kind of software is created, they *all* have to pass a compatibility test suite, created and managed by the ARB. With revison numbers, the OpenGL standard is fairly easy to follow and to extend. (1.2, 1.3,
While OpenGL has been criticized for being slow to face competition from Direct3D, the standard is here to stay, clearly defined.
IMHO, Sun should look into OpenGL type of managment. It looks very close to what they are trying to accomplish.