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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
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.
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.
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
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
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...
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,
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Little Brother, watching the watchers
> 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.
This is one reason why some people prefer the phrase "free software" over "open source". Because, as RMS points out here, the phrase "open source" de-emphasizes the community aspect of free software, and has led some companies (most egregiously, Apple) to thinking that they can just open up a little bit of code and then get free development.
For the record, I'm no free software firebrand. But given recent events, I've started re-reading some of RMS's tracts, and they continue to make quite a bit of sense. Sun is one company that just doesn't seem to get it (although the jury's not out yet). Does IBM get it? Too early to tell. It seems that the only ones that do are new companies (e.g. Red Hat/Cygnus, SuSE, etc.) that have started since the free software movement began.
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.
Part of what is not mentioned in any of these articles is that the former head of Java development at IBM (Patricia Sueltz) was lured to Sun towards the end of the summer and is now in charge of the Java effort there. While the article which announced the change emphasizes her wide view of Java and desire to keep Java unified, it remained to be seen whether this was lip service or not.
My thoughts are that Pat Sueltz did enough good for Java while at IBM that she ought to be amenable and keep a listening ear for response from those of us who count ourselves as "individual" (vs. corporate) members of the Java Community. Feel free to use this link to the java.sun.com feedback page, but please, be polite. Turning the wrath of /. on any company via their provided feedback mechanism(s) has bad karma, and a few well thought out, reasonable responses will get more attention that a thousand flame messages.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
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
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
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