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Fighting OS license proliferation

Posted by daniel on March 30, 2005 at 10:28 AM EST

Jini chooses Apache 2

A year ago at the seventh Jini community meeting, there was a forum in which the issue of licenses was raised. A community member made the following point:

It may be true that no existing license exactly fits the needs of your particular open source project. It may also be true that modifying an existing license to your needs requires very little in the way of changes. The result, however, is that your project is now using a non-standard license that requires the legal department to spend hours evaluating the license. Smaller companies with limited resources will not be able to allocate time for this evaluation and will therefore not be able to adopt and deploy technology using your project.

This is another case of best being the enemy of good. One aim of an open source license is to enable or require adopters to do the right thing with your software. At the eighth Jini community meeting, Bob Scheiffler presented different options for an open source license for Jini and carefully explained that the license has to meet the needs of both individual members and of business members of the community.

In Projects and Communities, the Jini community has released the Jini Starter Kit v 2.1 beta under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The kit gets "you started developing with Jini technology, as well as assist your advanced development and deployment of Jini technology-enabled solutions."

Apache 2. Is this the perfect license for Jini? Maybe - maybe not. I'm just glad to see that rather than rolling their own, the Jini community has chosen a well-known well-understood license that is also used for other widely adopted projects.

The Java Enterprise community project Survey Tool illustrates "how to use the various J2EE 1.4 web technologies together (JSF, JSTL, JSP and Servlet) to deliver powerful results", by offering an survey web application with a reporting tool that produces PDF output.

In Also in Java Today Robert Eckstein explains the Java API for XML Registries (JAXR) in an Enterprise Tech Tip. "Typically, a business registers itself with a registry, or uses a registry to discover other businesses with which they might want to interact. This Tech Tip [..] shows how the JAXR API can be used by a Java client application to access a business registry on the Internet."

"Requirements change very quickly as business and technology change. But with every change, big or small, do we need to throw away the complete system and start over?" Palash Ghosh says no, and the way to prevent it is to isolate functionality into components, classes, or groups of classes with an external API that fulfills a given requirement. In Java Component Development: A Conceptual Framework, he works out a set of best practices for thinking about and developing components in order to maximize flexibility.

Sebastian Lohmeier also points to Beta Release of Open-Source Jini in today's Weblogs . " Yesterday Sun released the Jini Starter Kit 2.1beta that besides adding interesting new features is the first release of Jini under the Apache Software License 2."

In Communicating Conundrum John Mitchell links to "Kim Burchett posted a great story illustrating the Misunderstandings that happen in the software business. Hilarious, in a sad, scary, and all too true way."

Jonathan Bruce reports on Recent finding: XQuery Adoption Rate Soaring? "In a recent developer survey conducted amoungst XML developers, some interesting findings jump out immediately: '52% of XML developers have already started working with XQuery in the last 12 months and another 33% have plans to start using XQuery in 2005'"

Grlea asks Where is JavaSound heading? in today's Forums. "I would like to know what the direction of JavaSound is for Mustang? Are there planned features? Is there a focus? (e.g. sampled or midi, bugs or RFEs?) Most importantly: is there anyone at Sun even working on javax.sound at the moment?"

Wangzaixiang adds to the thread he started asking to Please open JAXB2 source as soon as possible . "personaly, i am very interesting with JAXB2, since it provide a idea solution to process XML in java world than SAX, DOM and others. and i hope to using JAXB2 in our projects."

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Jini chooses Apache 2
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