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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?
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.
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
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.
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