"clarifications" on the side are worthless; the license is unusable

"clarifications" on the side are worthless; the license is unusable

Posted May 18, 2006 16:31 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (subscriber, #421)
In reply to: Java becomes more distributable by scrosland
Parent article: Java becomes more distributable

That's nice, but if that was their intent they should have said so in the license, rather than leaving it vague and open to later reinterpretation.

The goal of a license should be to give users and developers confidence and clear knowledge of what they can and cannot do. As it stands, the text of the license is so broad and vague in forbidding software with the "same or similar functionality or APIs" from running "in conjunction with" Sun's code, that it seems basically unusable.

I mean, "similar functionality?" That could include everything from Tcl/Tk to Mono. (Notice that it says "functionality or APIs" so it's not limited to things like classpath.)

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