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Corporate vs Open Source:Sun Stealing Blackdown?
An anonymous submittor droped this in the inbox: "A Linux Today story talks about how Sun repackaged Blackdown's porting of JDK 1.2.2 and called it their own. Even the script wrappers for this thing are the ones Steve Bryne wrote for the Blackdown effort and even have the name of the Blackdown developers in it. This is ridiculous! Is this what happens when corporate meets open source?" We all knew something like this was going to happen eventually. Hopefully Sun and Inprise will realize their mistake and take steps to correct it. If they do not, though...what steps can the Blackdown team take to protect their work?
logan
Please also note that Sun has decided to PULL JAVA from the ECMA standards process they were putting it through. Look here. IBM (and probably others) are rightfully pissed off. When is Sun going to learn? The funny thing is, despite all the bad press they get from pulling these stunts, they seem to keep getting worse each time! Must be McNealy's ego.
Devil = 1
Isn't this perfectly legal under the Sun Community License? It's not real nice, but I was under the impression that all changes to the Java source belonged to Sun.
Devil = 0
Overall though, even if this is ok according to "the law", it still bites the big one. I really like Java, it has a great deal of potential, (INMHO) both as a language and as a VM... stuff like this just makes it look really bad.
RobK
Myddrin
When the Sun Source Code License was first introduced, there was a thread on /. stating that Sun would behave in exactly this manner. You would make improvements to the Code, and Sun would then claim the benefits, and wouldn't even have to acknowledge you or your work.
The Blackdown folks did release their code back to Sun you know. And, the Blackdown project is not an open source project, they license the reference implementation of the JDK from Sun and modify it to run on Linux. Thats why its called the "Java Linux Porting project". Everyone should consider it a good thing that Sun is now taking interest. That means we will finally get a good JVM for Linux, something we have needed for a very long time.
But it stinks, methinks.
Companies do not mistakenly distribute other companies' commercial products as their own. If they did, they'd be in deep shit, so they're careful that way. Companies don't seem to feel they need to be careful with open source software. What are open source authors going to do about it?
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
There's already an active thread on this at blackdown's java-linux mail list. Blackdown developers, some Inprise developers, and just folks. My impressions:
- Inprise knows they started with Blackdown's work
- The initial PR did not mention Blackdown. Could have been the stupid marketing departments
- The Inprise folks say they are mentioning and crediting Blackdown in press interviews at the Java conference in NY
- everyone agrees more communications between the teams would help
- The SCSL apparently allows Sun to do anything it wants with any code provided back to them.
And BTW, a new release candidate of blackdown's port was released yesterday!
I'm concerned about Sun, too. Don't attribute to deliberate malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity [paraphrasing Pournell]. But keep your powder dry [anon.]
It says quite clearly on a page pointed to by the Blackdown FAQ about licensing that Sun owns all changes made under the non-commercial internal use agreement that the Blackdown team have agreed to.
If they object, having accepted the agreement, then that is their silly fault, frankly. To be honest though, I don't expect they will object as long as Sun give credit where it is due, and I imagine that their not doing so immediately is just a screw-up.
Just for the record, Sun still is the company who actually made the Java SDK. Blackdown just reconfigured it to work under Linux. Now, perhaps they should have put the proper acknowledgements and links along with the download. They could at least have asked the Blackdown-crew first. I'm assuming here. Anyone who know if they did?
./ers do nothing but file complaints all day. Before this happened, Sun got criticized for not having a Linux version of the Java SDK on their pages. Now that they do, we complain about that. As long as we get to complain, we are happy ./ers?
But is it really more wrong when a company does this thing, than when individuals or groups of people do it? I think the reason we react so harsh on this is mostly because Sun has ignored Linux support for so long concerning Java, in favour for their own OS.
It seems
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
So the sudden moves (no licence fees, linux support) may in fact be defensive maneuvres...
Not to mention that Jikes (a bytecode compiler made by IBM) is Open Source. They're actually giving back to the community, rather than (apparently) stealing from it.
I *hope* Sun hasn't stolen Blackdown (has anyone got in touch with them? Have they made a statement?). It's entirely possible that Blackdown turned the code over to them and Sun completed it. Before we start burning Sparc boxes in effigy, we should get a little more information.
Dana
the same code? Why is the release by Sun 21MB while the largest JDK 1.1.* release by Blackdown only 13MB? If you want to discuss the Blackdown 1.2 releases, the largest of those is 19MB in bzipped format. It doesn't appear to me to be the exact same package.
One of the things you're going to have to consider that these corporations have been dealing with TIGHTLY CLOSED source for the last several DECADES.
Any large corporation is very slow to change beneath it all (that's just the nature of the beast)--even though it would seem that they've changed thanks to marketing hype, etc.
If we voice our opinions (politely, preferably) about such things, most likely the changes will take place.
It's impossible to expect someone that has put nails into the top shelf of a cabinent for 20 years, to get up, go to another part of the factory and start painting PERFECTLY.
It takes JOB TRAINING. Who trains the corporations? The public does. Who trains the public? The media does. Who trains the media? Hmmm I'll stop before I start ranting..
Just raise the 'penalty flag' tell them the mistake politely (especially in public), and wait a bit. They'll learn.
With thanks,
Tenement
--
At first, when reading this, I decided that I should start to abandon my Java work. Then I realized the awful truth of the world.
Every place I've worked has happily used proprietary tools.
I work for a consulting company. 1/3 of the people do mainframe work, about 1/2 work on VeeBee, and the remainder do training or work (like I do) in Java, C/C++, UNIX, etc. Our business is based on the fact that companies produce proprietary languages like VB, Powerbuilder, Delphi, Visual C++, etc. They may be based on standard languages, but they are NOT standards except to themselves.
As long as there is money to be made in Java, I'll end up continuing to work in it. I might really want to be doing projects in Python or C++, but I'll end up working in Java because that's where the money is. And it's the same way for business. My clients don't care if Java is proprietary or not as long as their web-apps get done on time, just like they've always approached client server development.
So, in the end, it doesn't matter to the people who really matter--the people who pay for my paycheck. If you want this to change, the staff people in these corporations need to convince their managers that only standards-based and open-source products should be used for development.
Chris
Compare this to "Back to the Future" with the bully and McFly making him do his homework for him. Bastards..... Hello!?! McFly!
J-
Suppose I license my source code to you (and anyone else who wants it) on the condition that any works you derive from my source code are licensed back to me (and anyone else who wants it). Suppose further that you actually DO produce code based on mine. I think I (and anyone else who wanted to) would have every legal right to use your code.
Specifically, if you produce code based on my GPL'd code, then I think I'd have a real solid legal basis for assuming that what you produce is GPL'd, regardless of what license you try to put on it. If you tried to fight it, I think you'd rapidly find yourself in MASSIVE hot water over your technical, legal violation of my "intellectual property rights," since you used my code in violation of my license. If you didn't want to share your code, you shouldn't have used mine.
In this instance, if it were Sun (or some other big set of pockets) that did this, I'd definitely go for the big tamale - damages, treble damages, punitive damages, and criminal charges (despite what many think, willful violation of copyrights can be treated as criminal matters).
It was only a matter of time until this happened. Considering how "big business" has traditionally had a ruthless streak (like certain companies who shall remain nameless, because we're all tired of hearing about them) I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner. It may have already happened and who would know? I would think this would be one of the problems with open source vs. closed source. With a piece of software being closed source and provided to the public only in binary form, who's to say some open source code hasn't already been "borrowed" without credit being given to the original author or any changes that were made, being made open. As well, this case or a similar one is bound to end up in court and what will happen then? I, for one, hope we will have some good lawyers who can argue effectively for the open source position. Lawyers that understand what it is really all about and can convey that message to a judge effectively so he can make an truly informed decision.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
At the risk of treading on etiquette, here's a snip from a post made by one of the BlackDown contributors on a Sun mailing list:
Well, as I said in another mail, it looks at least a lot like they started out with the results of 4(?) years of Blackdown porting efforts. You need to have been on board in order to get a feel for the awful amount of work necessary to convert Solaris' threading to Linux' threading, etcetera. That this results in a comparatively small patch file does not mean that they weren't 90% jumpstarted by the Blackdown effort, and indeed only added a couple of patches and a few bits of functionality.
Of course, the really great thing is that a) we (Blackdown) were unaware of this effort, and b) we still have to see these fixes contributed to Blackdown. Not that it is really necessary, because the first team member already resigned so I think Sun and Inprise can maintain the port all by themselves in the future. I certainly won't lift a finger anymore to debug the Intel port...
Sun probably gave the, to blackdown, source under theire community license and gave them the right to publish theire work without paying anything to Sun.
Because that license give Sun the right to use the modification in theire own codebase, Sun can do what they did. What they cannot do is remove the copyright notice from code written by the blackdown team.
Now is it a good move from Sun, I don't think so. But the Blackdown project did nothing to protect themself.
Now the blackdown project has to re-evaluate their mission. One thing that Sun will probably not do is write a JIT for every platform that Lunix run on. So maybe blackdown could concentrate on making the source compilable on many platform and to provide a JIT, which can be written from scratch so Sun cannot advertise it as their own, for the different platform.
I don't know if someone else notice, but the Sun release run with green threads as default. It seems that they did not incorporate the new threading code that is present in the blackdown release.
Maybe it is not connected with this issue at all, but as its being announced just along with it,
Id bet that the cancelling of a Java stantard plan is something to worry about.
Ok. This withdraw would be a sad thing at any time.
-><- no
While your hypothetical is correct, GPLed code has the feature (or failure depending on your POV) that it forces derived code to be GPLed.
The code in question was not GPLed. Therefore the point is moot. In fact it was originally based on Sun code which was licensed with the requirement that changes became the property of Sun. Sun apparently used this to their advantage, as one might expect a business to do. You may argue the political sagacity of their move, but it seems perfectly legal to this non-lawyer.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I'm sure it happens all the time, but I doubt that people are stealing whole programs. The sticky area of the GPL, and an area that I've personally ventured into, is "micro-theft" of open source code.
:) What do you guys think? What qualifies as a GPL violation?
Here's an example: About two years ago I was developing an application for a client (who will remain nameless), and the app needed to have some simple word processing abilities (mostly just font support and page formatting abilities). While I got that portion of the application developed properly, there was a kludge in the code that I didn't particularly care for and which was slightly buggy. About 3 weeks after I wrote that portion of the app, I went over to a friends house and found him trying to track down a bug in a GPL'd word processor (which will also remain nameless). Since he had it open anyway, I decided to take a look and see how the author of that program had handled the bit I'd kludged. I liked the way the author had done it and a whopping 15 lines of his code ended up in my program (with just a little bit of editing).
So the question is, did I violate the GPL? What if I had just been "inspired" by his code and re-written a similar bit of code from memory? Could/should I be sued? Can I be forced to open the source? (I actually sold the program and all rights to the client, so I couldn't do that anyway) Where is the "magic line" here?
In case you can't tell, I've been wondering about these things for quite a while but this is really the first opportunity I've seen to bring them up
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Blackdown mistakenly thought that Java was the next big thing, and that for Linux to remain viable it *needed* Java. They reasonably agreed to whatever license Sun would grant, simply to get a JDK available for Linux before Linux missed the bandwagon completely. A reasonable, indeed selfless act, which, had Java really been as important as Sun convinced many of us it would be, would have been critical to Linux's success.
In hindsight it turns out to have been the other way around. Java, while a nice language in some respects, was basically just so much hype. Linux on the other hand quietly attracted 10-20 million users and snuck its way into corporate server rooms everywhere. It's growth rate appears to have not slowed down in the least, while Java languishes for lack of mindshare. Java needs Linux far more than Linux needs Java, and Sun successfully suckered good people into doint their work for them at no cost.
Very unfortunate, but a good lesson why one should really think twice, or even ten times, before contributing to a project under Sun's "community" license.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
By now most of us agree that Sun is completly within their legal rights to absorb the project. We also agree that it will probably help the Linux community. So why are we all upset?
/.'s and the refrenced news article's both begin with calling into question the morality of Sun's actions. They have planted the suggustion in our minds that Sun has done a big bad no-no and violated someone's rights. Once that suggustion had been planted they could go ahead and tell what really happened and the truth appears very different when seen under the light of our preconceived notions.
/dev/null
The way I see it is, we have been the victums of mininformitive news realease. Had the realease stated "O happy Day! Sun going to support Java for Linux!" We would, for the most part, been completly supportive of Sun. However the headlines,
Questions? Comments, email me.
Flames, raves, rants, complaints? Redirect to
Little Brother, watching the watchers
I'll tell you what - go download the tarfiles for EVERY package on the redhat discs, compile each one and install into a temp top level tree. Then tarball that temp tree so you can untar it into the root dir.
In the proccess fix all the little bugs that crop up with make files and old library calls, make patches for each source file tree.
Now, manage to build a boot floopy image and write an installer for your system. Heck - don't have to that's basicaly slackware.
However come up with a useful package management system that others can and do use as well to do all that in a few key strokes.
Then I'll lend an ear to your bitching about redhat or ANY distribution company making a living off the blood and sweet of coders. There is NOTHING to stop you and your closest geek friends from developing your own distribution. Just time and desire stop most people. New ones crop up all the time. Case in point - Mandrake actualy out sells Redhat now. However the BRANDING redhat has done is what works for them now. That had years of work behind it as well.
So clean out your mothers basement where you still live and get to work on that distribution kiddo.
--
James Michael Keller
"Linux is not our destination, it is simply the open road to tommorow"
> Wasn't this what happened to emacs? Someone made
m l
> xemacs and made it closed source.
no, it wasn't. do some research before you go around badmouthing a perfectly legitimate open source project like xemacs.
http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.ht
No estabilshed company is a friend of open source.
Redhat, etc owe their existance to open source programs, but Sun, Oracle, HP, Corel and even Inprise are just using us to get what they want.
Perhaps IBM is different.. They have at least tried. Maybe SGI, too - it looks like they need Linux to survive, now.
But understand this: MS should no longer be the primary target of our flames, and matching Windows should no longer be the goal of our development projects.
With the DOJ and the press watching MS like a hawk, we need to refocus.
Linux is now, without a doubt the premier Desktop Unix thanks to GNOME and KDE nothing against *BSD, but Linux is slightly better here, if only because that is what most developers use.
Next year Ittanium (sp?) comes out. Linux will be ready, for sure, and it will probably run flawlessly sooner than Windows2000 - but that ain't the game any more.
World Domination, remember?
Next year Montery also arrives. I still havn't seen even any speculation on how well Linux will compare to that.
SCO, HP, Intel, IBM and Compaq makes a pretty impressive team - all (except SCO) have Linux projects, too. What's going to happen when Montery and Linux go head to head for the same space?
Don't think that "Montery will be high end, and Linux will take the low end", either. That is just market speak for not having the features, yet. Both Linux and FreeBSD will, I believe, be very close to Montery (and Solaris) on Intel by next year.
What's going to happen then? Can we rely on Red Hat and VA Linux's money to compete?
Don't forget, these companies aren't like MS. They make pretty good software (for the most part).
Things like StarOffice are dangerous to Open Source, because they give the power back to the companies - and yet they are just as cheap (to the consumer) as Open source.. until Sun changes the file format or something like that.
Maybe it is time to play the Windows card? Linux does operate well in a Windows environment, and Windows computers are easily converted to Linux. Perhaps we need more open source software that interoperates well with MS stuff. Samba is great, maybe we need something that can provide DCOM services?
My Enemy's enemy is my friend. Sun was a useful ally. Lets not get stabbed in the back.
Its not like Visual C++ uses some mutant strain of C++. I doesn't? What the heck do you call goofy abominations like lstrcpy() lstrcmp() lstrcat()? Maybe the core language syntax is marginally ANSI-like, but their library implementations are highly wacked, not even including Win32.
And if you use any of VC++'s code generation, you are going to get stuff that is MFC dependant, which is in turn Win32 dependant.
Personally, I had a lot better luck with the Powersoft (Watcom) C++ compiler when I had to generate binaries under Windows. Their library implementations were much more normal.
Yeah, it bites that team Blackdown gets little recognition for their heroic efforts.
Since 'tis the season, you can help Blackdown by going to their website and ordering books. It's not much, but it may be all they ever get.
How can they feel the rain but not know of the flood?
And WHY should some more money to Rob, Hemos et al make any difference? This is (close to) the way Slashdot used to work even before Andover bought them. Effectively; nothing has changed, and that's probably as it should be.
It's really nice when the first post has content.
Anyway from what I gathered from the relevent posts Blackdown aggred to give code back to sun and SUNs people are trying to do right by Blackdown and give credit but something went wrong and posably some market droid just skipped over that detail.
So it's not like Sun is being an evil Microsoftian tyrent or anything it's just some minnor mistake and something Blackdown aggred to anyway. It's not Sun just walking away with an open source project and saying "te he it's ours now buddy".
But don't be so harsh on Slashdot for jumping the gun. There is a pritty good reason for having a GPL in the first place [thow Blackdown code is not GPL but thats a diffrent story] it's not an abitrary liccens saying "It's free". There have been a few cases when someone would "port" public domain code and copywrite the results or take public domain and modify it and sell the results.
On the surface this looked like exactly what Sun did.. but that isn't the case at all. Blackdown has an aggrement with Sun that LETS this happen Sun didn't just grab something becouse it's convenent.
Accually it dose urk me that it's totally legal to sell public domain as commertal but try to give away commertal and you go to jail. Thats just wrong. I don't advocate stelling commertal software but I think theft of public domain should also be illegal.
Also there is something of an advantage to burrying thies rants.. there is far more cogent data in the mod 3 to mod 5 area and I'm down here ancered by a score -1.. a "first post" post number 4... First posters beware slashdot dosn't update very fast you may not be the first poster after all.
I don't actually exist.
I've been using Sun hardware and software on projects for over 10 years and it has done a pretty good job scaling way beyond the wildest dreams of Bill and not crashing as soon as a load appears.
If their marketing and communications were as good as some of their technology then we'd have MCPs sitting on street corners with cardboard signs offering to reboot computers for food.
It's partly Suns own fault and this looks like another PR own goal but it's sometimes sad to see the slagging they get here no matter what they do. Among other things Sun created Java, not the dancing paperclip or the ten minute uptime. Take your pick but I know which camp I'm in.
The SCSL isn't a great deal in my opinion but they have yet to force people to sign it at gunpoint.
This was posted to the linuxppc-dev list a few days ago. Today, he posted to the list again, saying he had left Blackdown and asked if anyone wanted to take his place. For LinuxPPC users, this just plain sucks, as there is now no active jdk development for the platform. We can't blame Kevin, and I see this as a bad move by Sun all around.
A few things are reasonably clear... first, the Java licensing agreement Blackdown accepted allows Sun to do just what they've done... claim someone else's coding as their own work without crediting the coders. That's why SCSL isn't Open Source.
Second, this was almost certainly an oversight by ignorant marketing/legal staff, not a deliberate attempt to steal Blackdown's work and market it as their own.
So i think Sun should be judged by how they *react* to this criticism. Will they admit they were careless, and give proper (if not legally required) credit to Blackdown? Or will they get defensive and say that this is within their rights? Let's judge them by how they manage their errors, not by the errors themselves.
And, if anyone from Sun is reading this (especially Sun management)... my trust in Sun as the guardian of Java purity, and the trust of many members of the community, is on the line here. If Sun demonstrates now that they will acknowledge the contributions of volunteers to Java, i'll feel a lot better about the justifications Sun has made for not turning Java over to an independent standards committee. But if you take the Blackdown volunteers' work without properly crediting them (even if it is legal to do so), then i will not be able to trust Sun with Java anymore, and will turn to other sources. And i will advise my employer to do so as well.
Think about it, Sun.
---
Maybe that's just the price you pay for the chains that you refuse.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
There are many examples of 15 lines of code as a small script or utility with their own GPL licence. Would copying this into your own code be more or less a violation than copying 15 lines from a 1500 lines program? When it comes down to scripting you often realize that there is only one way to do something which makes the GPL a little bit worthless. Anyone making such a program would get a close solution. If the code can't be patented it can't have much protection from the GPL if used in a different context. Patrik
If what you are doing solves problems, and you just took a little bit of code, no one is going to care. Free code means you can look and can write code that has been shown to work. Any free software programmer that goes after such "transgressions" is a jerk, and just doesn't get it.
What the GPL expressedly forbids, is precisely what Sun did to Blackdown. Take an entire existing project, slap on a few minor enhancements, and call it theirs. A pity Blackdown is not GPLed.
"They're actually giving back to the community" :) :) MacNealy of Sin Microsystems announced that the Blackdown team had been awarded an all expenses paid trip to an exotic location/ nerd holiday in Silicon Valley / a top of the range Sin workstation in recognition of their efforts" - I think that would have been nice for them to say "thanks" to the Blackdown people. Whilst many of the Blackdown dev team may not have accepted it, at least Sin would have appeared to have tried to do at least a partially right thing.
Or are they just looking for some free debugging and patching?
Ooooh, I'm feeling cynical today!
That said, IBM's effort is at least a genuine effort to work with the OSrc community, instead of Sun's "you've worked hard, this is ours to make profit on now you suckers" attitude.
I don't know much about the Blackdown project, how long it took (someone mentioned 4 years) or how many people there were on it. And I'm sure that all of the committed, idealistic developers who gave their time & effort expected no reward other than the reward of NerdPay (ie just for the fun of it, because it's interesting). But it would have been nice to see something along the lines of "Scott (Scott? He's 'scot no friends
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
First of all, the code running /. today is not a year older than the 0.3 preball, or the 0.2 code. The code page itself mentions that both are somewhat orphans as the code now in use is more like a 0.4 release.
From what I understand, Rob Malda is now not the only coder working on the site -- supposedly andover.net has made it so possible for there to be three coders actively working to improve the /. engine.
In the mean time, I know that Malda is seriously sick of all the whining about the "where's the code????" because he posts occasionally to one of the mail groups and said something to the effect that "every time someone whines about the code, he wants to delay the release one day more." [Rob -- feel free to correct me here...]
I do feel that maybe the folks at /. and Andover should post a story which updates us all on the status of the newer code, and will probably e-mail Rob with a request to do so.
In the mean time, what I notice is that the response time is quicker, more stories are being posted, yes --some mistakes are being made, (and quickly apologized for), and it feels to me like things are becoming fun for Malda & co. again. (For a while they were burning the 70 hr a week candle, and just barely surviving monetarily).
Just my $.02 worth, with feedback always appreciated.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
It's wrong to say that they just repackaged the Blackdown work, however. Certainly the bulk of the package is Blackdown, but it appears that the Inprise part of this work is a new JIT system -- one that actually works. The JIT included with the Blackdown port is hopelessly broken. This has historically led to Linux JVMs having pretty much the poorest performance of any available JVM since you had to run it in interpreted mode.
This is not the only change we noticed. We had all kinds of problems using the Blackdown code with native threads -- serious performance degredation and unreliability. Not so with the Sun/Inprise version.
In our testing all run modes worked -- green, native, interpreted, and JIT. (Though there are some debugging messages that prove that this stuff is still not production quality.) This is a welcome change. Our testing shows a 60% performance improvement using native threads and JIT over the best we could get out of Blackdown RC2. That, my friends, is terrific news.
I still want to look at the IBM JDK 1.2 when it finally comes out, but for the moment we have something that's good enough to perhaps be used in a production environment. Now if I only had a debugger that worked...
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Sorry, but the only thing that has gone downhill since the sale, that I've noticed, is the greatly increased number of comments bemoaning Slashdot's descent into corporate evil.
:). You want accuracy -- maybe you'd like a real corporate news outlet like ABC or CNN better. Compare their Linux coverage for example, and see what you think about accuracy then. They check *all* their stories before release (and still manage to get them wrong -- go figure.)
You shouldn't come here for accuracy. You might come here for breadth of view and new insights -- or just a place to rant
If you want easy to use, predigested news, you're simply in the wrong place. Slashdot news requires thought, and sometimes research, not just passive acceptance as truth.
If this article is so bad, why not tell us why? Do you have facts that contradict it? Yes, the title is hyperbole, it was the credit that was stolen, not the code, but it's as accurate as most newspaper headlines. Seems to me this is an important story and I'm glad it ran. For a better written article try the place it broke, LinuxGrrls .
Well, I'm sure IBM is in for the profit and benefit to the company, that's how businesses operate. However, they do give back. Their compiler is open source. You can compile it and modify it (I'm sure there are some restrictions, I haven't read their license, but they took great pains to get it recognized as an Open Source license, presumably by OSI). Also VisualAge is closed source, but they ported it to Linux after an online petition generated over a 1000 signatures. They took Apache, had their engineers work on it and gave the fixes and improvements back to the Apache group (although I believe they initially tried to by Apache from them, at least they can be taught :) )
They are a big, greedy corporation, but I think they understand how open source stuff can benefit them.
I do hope, however, the Sun will give credit where credit is due to the Blackdown team when release the production version (what we have right now is a release candidate).
Dana
The issue here is that the Blackdown team has been working porting new versions of the JDK source to work on Linux for YEARS in good faith with the understanding that Sun would consider the results of their efforts the "unofficial but blessed-by-Sun Linux JDK". Blackdown trusted Sun to play fair and Sun turned around and stabbed them in the back.
The amount of ill-will on the java-linux list is impressive. I wouldn't be surprised if the Blackdown team finishes their port of the Java2 JDK and then simply walks away from the whole thing.
Sun has probably lost what little confidence Java-Linux proponents have had left and garnered the ill-will of a tremendous number of people.
Now it's plainly obvious why they engineered the SCSL the way they have and why they are continuing to stick with it despite protests that it's not truly Open Source. They don't give a rat's ass about Open Source - they just see its developers as a resource to exploit. Good luck exploiting it any further now.
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
You are right that Sun is within their legal rights under the SCSL. There is such a thing as unethical though. Removing credits from a project, or changing them is one of the most serious sins in the Hacker culture according to ESR's "Homesteading the Noosphere". I have to agree that nothing is more despicable. Free software contributors don't ask for money, all they ask is recognition that they contributed. Otherwise open source really is just faceless communism. Credit is very cheap to provide for anyone using the code.
If someone collected contributions to a charity, and then claimed to be contributing the money themselves with no mention of the real contributors, people would be outraged, and rightly so. This is not much different. In the real world, the money goes where it's needed and seemingly no harm is done. But try getting contributions again from those that were shafted. The problem is the same for Sun. Unless they move to correct this quickly, I think the SCSL is dead.
Congratualtions Sun. You have _finally_ done what more than 1500 Java developers have clearly been asking you to do for two years, TO THE DAY.
Bug #4097810 was posted on December 8, 1997. The number one bugfix request (now request for enhancement) for the entire period, indeed the request that has had more votes than the rest of the top 25 requests COMBINED has been to treat Linux as a first tier platform, to handle the releases for Linux in-house, instead of the arm's length (although increasingly more direct) support that, to date, has been given to Blackdown.
Today's announcement is great. This is what many hundreds of Java developers have been looking forward to, and what Blackdown and Sun have been working towards. I think that Sun and Blackdown deserve kudos for achieving this excellent result.
The focus of clueless slashdotters, who literally don't know how Blackdown came to have access to the code in the first place, how much direct assistance Sun has given to Blackdown, and who haven't noticed that Blackdown is actively involved in what's happened today is on an equally uninformed opinion piece in LinuxToday.
Wake up people, this announcement is what Sun, Blackdown and hundreds of Java developers have looked forward to for years.
This story is not about open-source, it never was, Blackdown was working with confidential code from day one, and it is apparent from looking at Blackdown's site that today's announcement isn't a problem, it's just part of what they've been working towards.
The GPL expressly does not forbid what Sun did to Blackdown. There is nothing illegal in taking a GPL'd program, making zero or more changes to it, and calling it your own, as long as you preserve the original copyright (of course, you may copyright any changes you make). The very fact that GPL does not require you to make mention of the original developers is what makes the "old" BSD license incompatible with GPL.
As to whether people will offer you good or ill will is another story, as ESR has discussed many times.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
I think the dividing line is code that provides some kind of functionality. I've been following the development of the Cygnus Java native compiler GCJ which has to deal with this issue. Since Cygnus expects to licence GCJ out to companies doing embedded development, they need to maintain full copyright of the code. So they have to decide about what amount or kind of code gives the contributer copyright privileges. That has only happened once so far that I know of, and that person introduced new functionality to GCJ. All other bug fixes they've accepted, sometimes many lines of code, haven't required signing any papers giving Cygnus copyright to that code. Which leads me to believe that it's only code that provides an implementation of an abstract concept as the magic line. But IANAL of course.
You just don't have to claim the copyright for yourself -- for example, you can assign the copyright to FSF (as required for those contributing to egcs) or perhaps to the orignal developer.
Rereading your reply, I think some clarification is in order. The GPL & the MEULA [1] are licenses, not copyrights. If you own the copyright, then you have permission to grant people the right to copy your material. This is done with a license -- and you can use different licenses for different people, even. If you choose to use the GPL, then you are requiring developers who combine their copyrighted material with your copyrighted material to use the GPL if they distribute the combined result.
[1] is this pronounced "moola"?
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
While reading your post, I couldn't help think of the Perl's mantra there's more than one way to do it. Skilled Perl types can look at code and, quick as a flash, code up something that does the same thing but looks vastly different.
Python on the other hand positively begs for everybody to do things in a similar way, if not the same way. This makes six or 12 month old code very readable and developers can continue to develop instead of helping maintainers maintain. But does it make small chunks of copyrighted Python code the building blocks for copyrighting the whole language? It's as dumb as copyrighting a sentence but we live in dumb times when it comes to technology.
I know that's an extreme thought but who would have thought that Sun -- of all companies! -- would stick it to a seemingly non-threatening entity?
I just hope they've learned something here...
The GPL permits you to do what you've said as long as the new product is also available under an open source license
Nope, with the GPL your derived work MUST be under the GPL, any other license, even Open Source, won't work, otherwise I take Linux, re-license it to the BSD style and then relicense the BSD style version to proprietary, would be too easy.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,