Re: [jakarta.ee-spec.committee] Interaction Between Code-First and Speci

[Mike Milinkovich <mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2018-06-01 7:57 PM, Bill Shannon wrote:

Mike Milinkovich wrote on 05/31/18 08:29 PM:

To address Bill's original assertion, there are two things happening which I think *do* permit the co-development of implementations and specs. At least in certain communities, using certain licenses.

1. The lawyers seems to be comfortable that you can take an API from an Apache-licensed project and derive a spec document from that under copyright law. The patent grants don't extend, but the idea is that every company involved in the spec project will be granting what patents they have. So clean on the copyright side, and as long as we have some significant patent holders involved, we have some patent aircover. Not bulletproof, but pretty good.

I don't think Oracle legal would be comfortable with that.

I have had hours of conversations with Oracle legal about this. It is always possible that I have completely misunderstood, but I believe that they are, in fact, comfortable with this.

If the spec contains Apache licensed and copyrighted material, that's third party content that's part of the spec, and needs to be considered when sublicensing the spec or deriving an implementation from the spec.

I think the reason that it actually works is that permissive licenses such as Apache allow re-licensing. The idea is we derive a specification from an Apache-licensed open source project, the copyright material from the project necessary to create the spec would be re-licensed under the specification license.

The reason we have to change the ECA et al at Eclipse is because our default license is the EPL, which is copyleft.