"Ean R . Schuessler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Tue, Jul 04, 2000 at 11:00:18PM -0700, Per Bothner wrote: > > The license for the documentation is: > > http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/relnotes/SMICopyright.html > > Now that license does have some problems, but that is another discussion. > > Well, even that isn't particularly clear.
Yes - as I said the license does have some problems. First, it is not clear whether the license has any legal meaning at all. It is publicly available documentation, and I don't know how they could legally restrict someone from using it to build a clean-room implementation. I.e. are they just permitting us to do something we can do anyway? (And of course the legal status of reverse engineering varies from country to country.) > First, the documentation states that your implementation must neither > subset nor superset their implementation. This raises interesting problems > if they have a patent on anything in their implementation, you wouldn't be > able to eliminate it and you wouldn't have a license to use it so you > couldn't comply. There is also the all-or-nothing problem: No subsetting implies a huge initial hurdle. I think we can reasonable interpret this as referring to no subsetting of *indivual classes*. We can also say that our *goal* is to implement the whole damn spec, but we have to do one chunk at a time. > They also state that you must pass all their test suites, however you can't > get these lovely test suites unless you are a licensee. I'm not clear how > one could comply with this requirement either. I could argue the onus is on Sun: If we don't have access to the test-suite, we can't verify compliance. However, our *goal* is to comply, and if any discrepencies are pointed out, we will attempt to fix the problem, to the extent of our abilities. -- --Per Bothner [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.bothner.com/~per/