Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:05:32 -0700
Hi everybody,
I am a software engineering researcher at the University of Victoria, in
Canada. I am part of group of researchers who are trying to understand
the way that free and open source software is reused, particularly with
an emphasis on how the license of the software plays a role in such
reuse.
In our analysis we have noticed that Glassfish has included copies of
some Apache code in its own source tree. We have tracked the evolution
of some of those files. See diagram attached, also available at
http://turingmachine.org/~dmg/temp/XMLChar-glassfish.gif
which shows one of such files:
src/java/org/apache/jasper/xmlparser/XMLChar.java
These files are particularly interesting to us because they have
suffered changes in their license.
This is the blame of that file, according to glassfish CVS browser:
https://glassfish.dev.java.net/source/browse/glassfish/appserv-webtier/src/java/org/apache/jasper/xmlparser/XMLChar.java?rev=1.3&view=markup
As you can see in the diagram, the original license of the file at the
time it was copied into the Glassfish tree was Apache version 2
(revision 1.1 of the file in glassfish), at which point the following
was added to the file, (before the original license statement of the
file that states that the copyright is own by Apache):
Copyright 2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
SUN PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL. Use is subject to license terms.
The Glassfish team later modified the license of the file to CDDL v1.0
(from Apache 2.0, at revision 1.2 of the file), and then to a dual
license CDDL + GPL v2 (revision 1.3).
It seems that the licensing statement of each file was probably changed
during a massive replace of all the files of the system. Furthermore,
the copyright ownership of the files was also changed significantly. As
you can see, even though the source code of the latest version of the
file is identical to revision 1.1, its header has been modified to
include:
...
DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS HEADER.
Copyright 1997-2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Portions Copyright Apache Software Foundation.
...
Given that Sun is not the copyright owner of these files, shouldn't
Glassfish revert the copyright of such files to the Apache Foundation,
in the form:
DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS HEADER.
Copyright 1999,2004 Apache Software Foundation
Portions Copyright Sun Microsystems
Any help to understand this evolution will be greatly appreciated.
-- -- Daniel M. German Associate Professor Dept. Computer Science University of Victoria http://turingmachine.org/ http://silvernegative.com/ dmg (at) uvic (dot) ca replace (at) with @ and (dot) with .
(image/gif attachment: XMLChar-glassfish.gif)