Donating code to Kaffe

[Godmar Back]

 Aaron,

I agree with all the factual statements in your mail and I also agree
to disagree.  It is true that discussions about licensing are often
less than fruitful.  Given that all three projects certainly subscribe
to the open source idea/principle/ideal, and ignoring for the moment the
LGPL/GPL subtleties, I think the difference lies not in licensing, but 
in the question of ownership.  I believe it is clear that kaffe and 
classpath are to a certain degree competing for resources in the free 
software community.  (*)  As such, I believe that the conditions 
surrounding potential contributions should be laid out in the open
for people considering to donate code.

>From this perspective, but this is only my perspective, I feel that
developers have more freedom if they are not forced to give up their
copyright on the code they contribute.  Other people may subscribe to
a different philosophy and find it quite alright if they sign the rights
to their code away to the FSF, for instance because they believe in
similar ideas as their founder.

	- Godmar

(*) although there's actually little reason why people shouldn't be
able to use classpath's VM-independent parts with kaffe.  The VM-dependent
parts I wouldn't want to use anyway cause this will be hard to make efficient.
But I have personally used classpath's java.beans implementation with kaffe
with success, and I don't have any problems with doing so.