Re: General Resolution: Removing non-freeeral Resolution: Removing non-free
On Fri, Jun 16, 2000 at 02:54:25PM +0100, Gilbert Laycock wrote:
> tb@mit.edu (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) writes:
> > Gilbert Laycock <gtl1@mcs.le.ac.uk> writes:
> >
> > > See the archives of the debian-java mailing list for details (which it
> > > is entirely possible that I have mis-remembered).
> >
> > Rather than a pointer to a long complex discussion, is there a
> > distillation of the resulting reasons why a Java 2 implementation
> > cannot be free?
no reason
> At the moment, I cannot find a place that summarises all the different
> problems with Java 2 licensing in a single document. (Unless you count
> the SCSL itself.)
>
> The following is my own attempt to summarise the situation.
>
> The Sun Community Source License (SCSL) under which jdk1.2, and (I
> think) the Java 2 specification, are released state that an attempt to
> produce your own implementation of the specification is a "derived
> work" and therefore also covered by the SCSL.
This is not legaly binding in any way.
Reasons:
- There was no precedence of such thing.
- if such thing were copyrightable, bash would fall undel sh copyright,
wine under MSwin9x copyright etc. (sh nor Windows authors wouldn't need to
state this. you have copyright by default or NO copyright at all.)
- if they even had a patent (they haven't), we could put
reimplementation of java2 to non-us anyway (no software patents in europe)
> The SCSL does not allow use for commercial purposes (you have to get
> (ie pay for) a separate license agreement with sun for that).
>
> Together these seem to prohibit there ever being a DFSG compliant Java
> 2 implementation.
no, they don't
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