Frank Sommers
Posts: 2642
Nickname: fsommers
Registered: Jan, 2002
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Re: Community Access to the Jini Starter Kit Codebase
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Posted: Apr 4, 2004 2:11 PM
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Well, I always thought that the JSK from Sun is just one implementation of the Jini specs. As it is a Sun project, I am not sure how others could contribute to the implementation itself. Since the Sun code is very high quality, production-ready code, I don't see how the community would benefit from having access to the development source tree. The analogy would be the Java VM itself: While the source code for Sun's implementation of the Java VM is available (under the SCSL license, AFAIK), it's a Sun product, and its development source is not available outside of Sun.
Now, what we don't have in Jini are fully open implementations of the entire Jini specs. With the JVM, there are fully open-source VMs. However, Rob Gingell once mentioned to me in an interview (available here on Artima), that VM's that never passed Sun's compatibility tests actually pose an interesting problem: While they claim to be Java VMs, they are really not "officially" sanctioned VMs. Other than their users, no one really knows if they function exactly to the specs. With JVMs, you apparently had to license the test harnesses from Sun, which did cost money, and which many open source projects did not want to pay for. Note that in 2002 Sun had remedied that situation by eliminating the fee associated with those test kits.
I wonder whether the current Jini licensing mechanism would allow a fully open implementation of the Jini specs. I used to think that the answer was an unequivocal no, but after doing a bit of research on licensing and the JCP process, I'm not sure any more. I think the answer really depends on the copyright and license on the Jini specs themselves, and then the copyright on the Jini name itself. While I'm not sure about an open-source implementation, I know that Jini implementations have already been created inside the SCSL licensing scheme.
I do think, though, that being able to create a fully open-source implementation of the Jini specs would benefit the broader Jini and Java community, since implementations would soon find their way into numerous open source projects and distributions. That, IMO, can only further the Jini cause, and contribute to Jini's ubiquity.
Additionaly, many academic research projects prefer open-source licenses, since the students working on those projects often desire the broadest possible dissemination of their work. That's in keeping with the spirit of academic cooperation (which actually contributed to the collaborative spirit of the open source movement itself, according to Eric Raymond). Open source licensing also simplifies distributing code, since many university departments are not set up to police various software license distribution mechanisms (especially if the college can't create revenue from those projects). If you use Jini in a research project, you can't just post a tar ball of your code on a Web site. That's a problem. I personally encountered that problem with a project I worked on in the past, and that project's source code is irretrievably buried on some university computers.
At this point, I'm inclined to support an open source Jini initiative. In the past, I believed that the SCSL license was important to protect Jini's integrity. I think an objective way to test that hypothesis is to review the experience with the SCSL and Jini from the past 5 years, and see actual cases where the SCSL prevented abuses. In other words, I'd like to see cases where Sun actually had to go after Jini impostors. If that never happened, then the SCSL might be a sheild against a strawman, and it might truly restrict Jini's wide and ubiquitious dissemination. Of course, we wouldn't really know if that's the case, until an open source Jini implementation becomes an option.
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