To pre-empt a lot of poorly informed comments...

Posted May 9, 2005 16:37 UTC (Mon) by sab39 (guest, #2185)
In reply to: To pre-empt a lot of poorly informed comments... by b7j0c
Parent article: A proposal for a free Java implementation

It does seem that there's a lot of uncertainty over exactly what the licensing issues are and how serious they are.

However, there has been an explicit promise by the Classpath developers that they WILL make clarifications to their license as necessary to alleviate the Apache group's concerns.

And there have been promises from the Apache people to identify and clarify their exact problems with the license in order to figure out exactly what clarifications, if any, are necessary.

In other words, the chances of NOT using Classpath are pretty slim. There's always the chance that there could turn out to be some major roadblock in the details of what Apache wants from the Classpath developers, but at the moment both sides are saying the right things (except in the announcement which has been apologized for). There are no plans at this point to start a new project from scratch redoing what Classpath already did. They're leaving that option open in case it turns out to be impossible to reach an agreement with the Classpath developers. But it's unlikely, since everyone recognizes how stupid and painful that would be.