Sun has posted a new draft of their openjdk trademark license. If I read it correctly, it basically says you’re OK to use it as long as it is the ‘vast majority’ of the code is the same as the official codebase. The ‘vast majority’ language seems like a reasonable compromise, allowing the copyright license to have effect for the most common uses (small bug patching, build fixes, porting, etc.) while still preventing completely egregious uses of the mark.
[Was posted some weeks ago, but my brain has turned to mush, so I’m going through old email to pick off low-hanging fruit instead of doing the hard, important stuff, so here it is.]
You could still do naughty, trademark-reputation-harming things in a version where the “vast majority” of the code was legit. Leaking personally identifiable information, weakening the random number generator — this wouldn’t work for the trademark terms of a project intended for end users.
Don: short answer: that’s why you won’t see this license on ‘Java(tm)’ any time soon. :)
longer answer: I think that’s one of the prices you pay for having a real, vibrant, decentralized community. If you can come up with a better formulation that doesn’t give the center veto power (with the resultant problems), while resolving your issues, I (and many others) are all ears.
Note this is not the last word in trademark licensing for open source at Sun. As I implied by my blog post[1], we hope to carry on “experimenting” and we’d like to continue the conversation with other communities that started at OSCON last year about how to evolve a set of good solutions for trademarks in open source generally.
[1] http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/answering_michael
Simon: I didn’t figure, but great to hear that from the horse’s mouth. I may actually be able to slip up to the OSCON weekend (though not formal OSCON itself); if so, I certainly hope to participate.
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