Re: Mauve license

[David Gilbert <david dot gilbert at object-refinery dot com>]

Stuart Ballard wrote:

> (including the Classpath list as well as Mauve list here as I don't
> know how many people actually read the mauve list)
>
> Recently on the Harmony list there's been some discussion of how tests
> should be written and where they should be put. I chimed in pointing
> out what I thought would be a no-brainer - tests for public APIs
> should be in Mauve of course.
>  

Indeed.

> I only just made that post and I haven't seen the responses yet, but
> it occurred to me to look and see what Mauve's license is just to make
> sure that wouldn't be a showstopper, and, well, as I'm sure many of
> you know, it's GPL.
>
> This is slightly strange to me. We (the Free Software community) are
> forced to make our own test suite because Sun won't release theirs
> under terms we can use, but when we do write our own, we put it under
> a license that prevents even other Free Software projects from working
> with it. Our test suite is under a stronger copyleft than Classpath
> itself is!
>
> I understand why we want Classpath itself to be copyleft. But what on
> earth benefit are we getting from preventing people from
> "proprietarizing" our testsuite?
>  
Free to use, free to redistribute, and since you'll never want to 
combine Mauve with anything else, I can't see why the GPL is considered 
a showstopper.

> My understanding is that a license change could be difficult to effect
> at this point because I don't think a copyright assignment has been
> required for Mauve contributions and therefore there are probably a
> lot of copyright holders, some of whom may be difficult to track down.
> But if it *could* be managed (and if the Harmony hackers could be
> persuaded to put their tests there), I think it would be a major win
> for everybody.
>  
I think a more significant "problem" is practical:  Mauve, which 
predates JUnit, uses its own test harness and Harmony is using JUnit.  
Integrating the two is a pile of work that you're not going to find 
anyone willing to spend time on.  I think we should just accept that 
there are going to be two separate test suites, that will overlap in 
some places.  It's not that big a deal in the scheme of things.

> Mauve gets a bunch of new contributors (Harmony certainly seems to
> have a fair bit of momentum at this point) and code (I believe some of
> Harmony's big contributions came with test suites that could be
> integrated).
>
> Classpath and Harmony both get a bunch of new tests.
>  
We have those tests now, just in separate places.

Regards,

Dave