Gosling out of Harmony

We’ve got several thousand man-years of engineering in [Java], and we hear very strongly that if this thing turned into an open source project—where just any old person could check in stuff—they’d all freak. They’d all go screaming into the hills.

I don’t know of any open source project “where just any old person could check stuff in.” Certainly not any ASF projects. Not even any SourceForge projects! Open source is not about open CVS repositories but about open licenses. However, “Gosling doesn’t buy into the theory that Harmony’s need lies in alternate licensing…” Well, unfortunately alternate licensing is the whole point. I don’t know what other theory there is to buy into.

Let’s look at the next choice Gosling quote, this time on the trouble with open source licenses.

In the open source community, if you actually care about being legally clean, it’s a nightmare.

How is it any more or less so in the commercial, proprietary world? Yes, it is difficult. That’s why we have foundations like the ASF.

Most people don’t actually read the licenses.

As opposed to all those who diligently read Sun’s licenses.

Every day or two there’s something about someone getting hammered for GPL violations,

We’re not talking about the GPL, we’re talking about the ASL. They’re very different. When’s the last time you heard about someone being hammered for an ASL violation?

and most of the people who are doing it don’t even know it.

The article continues:

For Sun, the stakes are too high to be loose with licensing, according to Gosling. The JCP employs the JSPA (Java Standards Participation Agreement) as a means of verifying that contributed ideas and concepts are “legally clean.”

For Apache, the stakes are too high to be loose with licensing, according to Aaron. The ASF employs the CLA (Contributor License Agreement) as a means of verifying that contributed ideas and concepts are “legally clean.”

As I said, I can respect Sun’s decision to license Java as they have. I have no problems with Sun’s approach myself and I work with Java and open source every day. I understand that Sun wants to be “excruciatingly careful” with maintaining and controlling Java and that’s fine. But I really don’t appreciate someone as intelligent and respected as James Gosling spreading falsehoods and implying open source developers or foundations like the ASF can’t be trusted with something like Java. While Geir and the others look to make Harmony, Gosling is only spreading dischord.