Re: Mauve license

[Stuart Ballard <stuart dot a dot ballard at gmail dot com>]

On 2/16/06, David Gilbert <david.gilbert@object-refinery.com> wrote:
> Free to use, free to redistribute, and since you'll never want to
> combine Mauve with anything else, I can't see why the GPL is considered
> a showstopper.

Politics don't have to make sense ;)

The logical conclusion of your statements, though, is that the GPL
isn't actually making any practical difference. And if that's the
case, what's the point of using it?

> I think a more significant "problem" is practical:  Mauve, which
> predates JUnit, uses its own test harness and Harmony is using JUnit.
> Integrating the two is a pile of work that you're not going to find
> anyone willing to spend time on.  I think we should just accept that
> there are going to be two separate test suites, that will overlap in
> some places.  It's not that big a deal in the scheme of things.

AIUI currently you couldn't integrate the two if you wanted to because
JUnit is under a non-GPL-compatible license. Another reason why a
Mauve license change would be a benefit.

From a practical point of view, if the license issues disappeared, it
would presumably be easy enough to create a "junit" directory in
mauve, have the mauve launcher scripts run both junit *and* the
existing harness, pull the harmony tests into the new folder,
everybody write new tests as junit tests, and gradually convert the
old tests one-at-a-time over time. It wouldn't have to be a once-off
"convert the world" operation.

> We have those tests now, just in separate places.

True. The current situation isn't a disaster. It would just be nice to
get some cooperation in a place where, IMO, it clearly *does* make
sense and the showstoppers seem to be entirely unnecessary.

Stuart.

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