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Jini and the Sun Community Source License (SCSL)
Julien Flack writes "JavaWorld has an interesting article on the Jini
Community and its approach to open source.
The Sun Community Source License (SCSL) "is an
amalgam of open source principles and for-profit
licensing models of the past." according to this
article, which claims SCSL is in the spirit of
ESR' Bazaar. "
Funny that - 21,000 paying developers at this year's JavaOne expo. Quite a cold reception.
What's the problem with session ID's, again?
Since you (or your predecessors) are the people who built the internet, you do realize that they can track you WITHOUT those, through webserver logs.
That would logically mean that there probably was another reason for it. I mean, you're not one to give into silly conspiracy theories, are you?
Oh wait, you forgot also that *SUN* helped build the internet - that Bill Joy pushed the use of TCP/IP commercially in the early 80's and actually WROTE the first UNIX-os that included a TCP/IP stack. Pity.
These grandiose statements that "Sun is faling with Java among the 31337 programmer community" never cease to make me smile.
The open source community's opinion does not reflect world opinion. I also question that the open source community is "technologically savvy" from a programming perspective. Talent is a rare thing in general, and while OSS is lucky to have several very talented programmers (Linus, Alan, Alfredo, etc.), it seems that those people aren't the type to blow-pipe over "Why XXX sucks", whereas the people who couldn't code themselves out of a box troll Slashdot with their ignorant drivel.
Java is an over-hyped technology that doesn't provide any advancement in the art of programming. It is, however a valiant attempt at doing "objects over again", to make up where C++ and Smalltalk failed. [Not that these languages are failures, but in 1999, C++ is a technological mess, and Smalltalk is a business mess.]
-Stu
They haven't outright and clear said so yet, but there are very strong hints that they plan to make most, and perhaps eventually, all of their software "community source".
At the JavaOne developer conference recently, this is what Bill Joy said:
Next there's this idea for the Java platform. We tried to create a community and protect it from a predatory company that we were aware of that was likely to try to attack us with contract law, and discovered that contracts sometimes aren't enough to protect us because not everyone thinks they apply to them.
So what we've decided to do going forward is to try to work from a notion of community. You've seen the Java Community Process (JCP). The JCP allows stakeholders in the different areas, like the people who care about realtime to define the realtime stuff, and that's a really good thing.
More recently we've done Community Source, which is an attempt to blend the best things about open source and proprietary models together with the added benefit from open source that when you take a Community Source license, you're allowed to make proprietary enhancements to it. We still insist that you leave the APIs open, but you can take large chunks of commercial money and make commercial investments. This works for companies.
The open source model works for other communities, and for them it's great. But we wanted to come up with a model that would work for traditional companies as well, so that we could quickly move into Community Source as much of our intellectual property as possible, and hopefully all of it going forward. But we insist also that people remain compatible.
So Community Source has an additional right and an additional responsibility relative to open source. We've done this with a lot of our technology already, including picoJava, and Java and Jini technologies. We'll be doing it with more.
I think they way they're going with Jini is pretty good. They could do better for Java though. They're being kinda closed about what they're going to open though, and have only dropped hints and not made definite statements on their website.
However, some things they have hinted/said are: they will open up Solaris later this year. Also, on one of their Solaris pages they say they'll be making a new version of Solaris (presumably Solaris 8) available under their "easy access" (ie beta) program - they've never done that before. They also seem to be working on making their C/C++ development software and compilers available, and to Linux users as well - to help develop code that works on Linux and Solaris more easily. They've also made other things not mentioned in that article available under their "community source".
They do seem pretty serious about it.
Now, another Sun staffer claims Open-Source-like attributes when the SCSL is clearly not Open Source. More distortion.
Does it seem that Sun is grasping at straws here? IBM has released a license for its Java compiler that is compliant with the Open Source Definition. A Java VM is available under the GPL from Transvirtual. Other Java components under bona-fide free software licenses are in process. You don't have to go to Sun for Java any longer.
The most laughable part is that they feel the SCSL is necessary for real companies, and that those companies would not participate in Open Source. Yet, IBM, Apple, and many others belie that claim.
I think Sun has learned some valuable lessons from the Linux development. They just haven't been able to accept them yet. When they do, the SCSL will go away.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
So, like, I figured I should read this license to figure out what's up. I looked around a bit and eventually found it.
The very first thing I noticed is that it's much, much more difficult for a layman to read and understand than the GNU GPL is. Now, everyone reading Slashdot knows how much controversy, confusion and debate the GPL has spawned -- imagine how much worse it would be if the GPL had been written in this incomprehensible style. The SCSL has no preamble which explains the intent of the license; and in order to make any sense of the text of the license, one must continually refer to the license's Glossary to figure out what is meant by all of the Capitalized Words. The SCSL is actually three or more separate licenses all concatenated together, and you have to read a meta-license to determine which of the sublicene(s) apply to you.
So, while I didn't bother reading all of the license, I got the following out of it:
The software is only free (in the Debian Free Software Guidelines sense) for Research Use. You can't use the software freely if you actually have a job. (The Internal Deployment Use sub-license isn't free, either.)
For any other use (including commercial use), there are unacceptable limitations. You can't distribute modifications, and you can't disassemble or reverse engineer executables.
The last thing I noticed, after I quit reading the license in disgust, was that there was a "session ID" appended to the URL. It seems that Sun wanted to track me as I browsed their site. Naughty Sun! (The actual URL that I got for the license when I finally got to it was http://www.sun.com/jini/licensing/scsl_jcp_v.1.6c_ web.html;$sessionid$E5HGUBAAAV2LDAMU VFZE3NQ -- but I snipped the "session ID" garbage from the end before adding the license link in the first paragraph.
Does Sun really think that programmers are so bone-headed that we won't see right through all of their little tricks? We (or our predecessors) are the people who built the Internet! We aren't stupid, and we notice details. Your lawyers can't bury us with avalanches of mumbo-jumbo, because we programmers will eventually pick our way through the maze and find the rotten trash you dropped at the exit.
By playing these petty little power games with us, Sun only continues to alienate us. This is why Java has met with such a cold reception among the technologically savvy user and programmer community -- Sun doesn't want to play by the rules.
Well, just remember that the ultimate power is ours, not theirs. We have the power to disregard Sun's offerings until they come up with a way to work with us instead of against us. Sun isn't offering anything we need -- they're trying to grow a market. We've already got the tools and the talent to go our own direction, without Sun's poisoned candy. So while Sun keeps shooting itself in the foot and feeding fluff to the "HTML coders", we can go on with our lives.