Sun Licensing Journey

Documenting the process we are going through with Sun to try and change some of the license so we can distribute JARs that will make building many projects a lot easier.

  • [ 18 Feb 2003 ] Geir has contacted Bill Shannon and asked what could be done about the JavaMail license. Geir explained that Maven doesn't use JavaMail directly but on behalf of project and though even technically the license is violated the spirit of the license is not.
  • [ 18 Feb 2003 ] Bill Shannon responds that Maven's use is in the spirit of the license though not technically allowed. He directs us to Tom Kinkaid who is the manager of JavaMail.
  • [ 30 April 2003 ] I had a long discussion with Tom Kincaid about the licensing issues and we will not be able to distribute the Sun JARs from ibiblio but that the scraper would be a workable solution. I have to get Tom a list of JARs that we would like to be able to retrieve with the scraper and he would commit to checking with each of the people within Sun responsible for the said package.
  • [ 10 June 2003 ] The following is a list of JARs that we would like Tom Kincaid to check into:

    activation

    j2ee

    javamail

    jaxb

    jaxm

    jaxp

    jaxr

    jax-rpc

    jca

    jce

    jdbc

    jdo

    jdori

    jhall

    jms

    jmx

    jndi

    jndi - fscontext - in fact all of the extended service providers

    jnlp

    jsr-94

    jta

    jts

    ejb

    resolver 1.1 XML Entity and URI Resolvers (by Norman Walsh)

    saaj (SOAP with Attachments API for Java)

  • [ 19 June 2003 ] I've sent a message to Tom Kincaid stating which packages we would like to access with the scraper.
  • [ 23 June 2003 ] Tom Kincaid wrote back and asked for details on how the scraper would work. So just reassured him that everything would come from the Sun sites and that the user would still have to accept the license for the said package. The user would just be saved from the details of locating the package manually on a Sun site.
  • [ 14 July 2003 ] Everyone is back at Sun and Tom Kincaid wrote up a draft of a message to send out to product managers and the legal department at Sun describing exactly the process we want to use to retrieve Sun binaries. So things are moving at Sun.
  • [ 6 October 2003 ] Geir Magnusson, who is Apache's JCP representative has volunteered to carry out discussions with Graham Hamilton. Graham is a VP and a Sun fellow and can't promise anything but believes that he might be able to help to allow to store the JARs directly in the repository.