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Re: Mauve license
- From: Andrew Haley <aph at gcc dot gnu dot org>
- To: Stuart Ballard <stuart dot a dot ballard at gmail dot com>
- Cc: GNU Classpath <classpath at gnu dot org>, mauve-discuss at sourceware dot org
- Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 16:54:00 +0000
- Subject: Re: Mauve license
- References: <ba76afd90602160755t72a84b31l402af391a5dfe61d@mail.gmail.com>
Stuart Ballard writes:
> (including the Classpath list as well as Mauve list here as I don't
> know how many people actually read the mauve list)
>
> Recently on the Harmony list there's been some discussion of how tests
> should be written and where they should be put. I chimed in pointing
> out what I thought would be a no-brainer - tests for public APIs
> should be in Mauve of course.
>
> I only just made that post and I haven't seen the responses yet, but
> it occurred to me to look and see what Mauve's license is just to make
> sure that wouldn't be a showstopper, and, well, as I'm sure many of
> you know, it's GPL.
>
> This is slightly strange to me. We (the Free Software community) are
> forced to make our own test suite because Sun won't release theirs
> under terms we can use, but when we do write our own, we put it under
> a license that prevents even other Free Software projects from working
> with it. Our test suite is under a stronger copyleft than Classpath
> itself is!
Err, we created Mauve with a GNU licence because we're GNU
maintainers. Hard as it may seem to believe, some of us *like* the
GPL.
> I understand why we want Classpath itself to be copyleft. But what on
> earth benefit are we getting from preventing people from
> "proprietarizing" our testsuite?
>
> My understanding is that a license change could be difficult to effect
> at this point because I don't think a copyright assignment has been
> required for Mauve contributions and therefore there are probably a
> lot of copyright holders, some of whom may be difficult to track down.
> But if it *could* be managed (and if the Harmony hackers could be
> persuaded to put their tests there), I think it would be a major win
> for everybody.
>
> Mauve gets a bunch of new contributors (Harmony certainly seems to
> have a fair bit of momentum at this point) and code (I believe some of
> Harmony's big contributions came with test suites that could be
> integrated).
>
> Classpath and Harmony both get a bunch of new tests.
>
> Harmony hackers get to see that Classpath hackers aren't inflexible
> GPL-zealots, and both groups of hackers get used to working together
> on a project that benefits both.
>
> I don't think it's a coincidence that all the projects that originally
> collaborated on Mauve ended up combining their class libraries,
> either. Once people get used to working together, the level of
> collaboration can only go up from there...
Sure. But in the case of a test suite, none of us could think of a
reason not to use GPL.
Andrew.