[lsb-discuss] LSB conf call notes for 2008-07-30

Dalibor Topic Dalibor.Topic at Sun.COM
Fri Aug 8 17:32:13 PDT 2008


On 08/08/08 21:28, R P Herrold wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Aug 2008, Theodore Tso wrote:
>
>> (And if Sun's lawyers decide to go after those distributions with 
>> scarry cease-or-we- sue-the-pants-off-of-you letters, particularly 
>> with non-commercial distro's such as Gentoo, Debian, etc. --- the LSB 
>> wouldn't be involved, and we can just stand back and watch the 
>> Slashdot bonfire from a distance.  :-)
>
> So, exposing people to an NDA, and potentially unlimited liability, 
> and defense costs, in order to be be able to test and demonstrate 
> their distribution is LSB complaint is fine?
I believe Ted was joking, judging by the smiley he used - Sun hasn't 
done unspeakable things in the past, and given that it has collaborated 
with the Java libre community (centered around gcj, kaffe, GNU Classpath 
and various community distributions) in the past around Java, OpenJDK, 
etc. it'd seem like a very unlikely, smiley worthy scenario.

To give you two unlikely examples, Debian developers and Sun worked 
together in May 2006 to make DLJ work for them, and Debian has been 
shipping Sun's binaries since then without getting sued by anyone. 
Fedora developers and Sun worked together to make OpenJDK certification 
work for them, and Fedora has been shipping OpenJDK builds on x86 and 
amd64 that pass the JCK since June 2008. And so on.

They've earned their trust through steady work with and within the Java 
libre community, and keeping their word on opening up the reference 
implementation of the Java platform. I understand that may not be good 
enough for everyone, though, and that's fine, that's what discussions 
like this one are for.
> I think not.  I think the LSB cannot in good conscience place 
> distributions in the line of fire, until and unless the testing tool 
> is not a 'spring gun'.
I don't understand the term 'spring gun' - could you elaborate?

cheers,
dalibor topic

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