Okay, well we have taken a look at the legal side of this argument (unsuprisingly) and here's what we know:
1. JDK 1.0 - very liberal license, pretty much allowed you to do what you wanted. 2. JDK 1.1 - clean-room license, allows you to use the spec for a clean-room implementation so long as you implement the entire spec. It's worth nothing that without this taking Sun's specifications into your 'clean-room' violates your clean-room. At Transvirtual we tend to call what we do an "independent implementation". 3. JDK 1.2 - SCSL - about as open as the former Soviet Union. You cannot use their specs to write your own implementation and call it your own - doesn't even matter if it's commercial or not. Because of (3) Transvirtual hasn't been pushing JDK 1.2 compliance in Kaffe since it's unclear we could actually use the results if Sun asked us not to. We have infact started this work but we know we may have to pull it if Sun were to threaten us. There is a little hope here however and that is with the various standards bodies. Sun have submitted to ECMA and eventually to ISO and if you've been following this things have not gone to plan. It looks increasingly likely that Java 2 will become some kind of ISO standard from which everyone can implement without being owned by Sun. Be nice that, but it's not happened yet. There's also Sun's submission to the ATSC DASE committee (US digital TV overlords) to make Java a standard on that platform and we can hope that the platform will also be open (I've been involved with some fighting here too but Sun are in bed with Philips on this one and I'm not hopeful). If you suppose the worse case then JFORK would have to use JDK 1.1 as a basis and take off in a different direction and actively *not* include JDK 1.2 technology ... and that'd be difficult to do cleanly since everytime I pick up a Java magazine there's some article about Collections or Weak References, or something else. Because the specs. are published you cannot avoid contamination - so forget your cleanroom. Oh, and this is supposing Sun don't enforce the JDK 1.1 "no subsetting or supersetting" restriction on you which, if they did, would force you back to JDK 1.0 as a starting point. On the plus side for the SCSL it is possible that the "academic use" aspect of it may infact have caused Sun to release their intellectual property claim to some extent and so despite the remaining clauses in the license, using their documentation but not their code might be okay. This is an issue of copyright v. contract (not completely unlike what M$ are arguing in court right now) and the only way we'll find out if this is actually true is for it to goes to court. Right now only M$ is likely to try this. You can also argue that Sun is abusing it's copyright by publishing specifications you can buy in a bookstore and then denying your rights to reimplement. But this stuff is big lawyers and lots of money territory. You'd think that if you can buy a spec in a bookstore and you write an implementation of it then you're okay? Wrong. A contract in a book might mean diddly squat but the copyright is another thing entirely - and copyright have the potential to be more damaging that contracts or even ludicrous software patents. In Sun v. M$ Sun's claim is that M$ abused copyright (since they screwed up the contract so badly they probably won't win the case based on contract law) while M$ argues this is a contact dispute. If the judge sides with M$ then the software industry as a whole is screwed, never mind Java, any spec published by any company that you choose to re-implement is open for later "abuse of copyright" charges if the company feels like it. It'd be like IBM telling Oracle that they're not implementing SQL quite right so they'd better stop doing it, oh and pay them for the priviledge. Anyway, enough of my ranting. JFORK might work in bringing the attention of the Java community to focus on the real problems of the SCSL but it will probably get used as a weapon by Sun to protect their "standard" from "abuse". The real issue here is not Java so much as the perception of the SCSL and right now I don't know how you effectively change that - I boycott it but how do you presuade the 250,000 people who downloaded Star Office to do the same. Regards Tim Wilkinson, Transvirtual Techologies, Inc.
