[News.eclipse.foundation] Re: GNU License text version

[Alex Blewitt <alex_blewitt@xxxxxxxxx>]

> > Yes, that's why I was <a href="http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t84348.html";>wondering if Sun's GPL</a> is such a good thing earlier. 

> I think Sun's thinking went a lot deeper than that. Yes, I expect is was 
> a part of the consideration ... one of my colleagues speculated that the 
> decision was one of whom to befriend and whom to anger ... and 
> IBM&Eclipse are definitely not on Sun's friends list. 

There's certainly never been much love lost between the two. To some extent, competition is good though -- after all, both Eclipse and NetBeans have improved dramatically because of the other's presence.

> ASL, as an academic license, would have given others (specifically 
> competitors) too many ways to take Sun's work and use it as their own, 
> whereas the GPL's reciprocal clauses force consumers changes out into 
> the open. 

On a point of pedantry, I believe that they call it the AL rather than the ASL -- it's at the Apache Licenses page (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)

Note that regardless of license, you still couldn't call it Java. It's also not the only one which requires changes be contributed back. What it does give, above all else, is a reason to include it in Linux systems on the back end, which hasn't really been a major success in the past. Regardless of anything else, I think that it will have a positive impact in the Linux world.

Alex.