Where do I begin?

[Per Bothner]

> If kaffe forks, it seems likely that the non-commercial branch
> would discard the clean-room model entirely.

I doubt it.  Neither the FSF or or Cygnus or RedHat or Debian or any
commercial Linux distributor are into putting big "sue me" signs
on what they do.  Perhaps you might be.

> I suppose that if the clean-room model had *not* been followed initially,
> the commercialization of kaffe might have been prevented as a direct
> result.

Suppose what you will.  But since you did not contribute to Kaffe,
it is not very interesting what you suppose.  Perhaps *you might
have* contributed to Kaffe were it not for the clean-room policy,
which I guess gives you some right to speak up.  But such a
hypothetical is still uninteresting unless it comes someone with
an actual free software track record.  Most people who could have
contributed usefully, but where prevented by the clean-room policy,
were able to find some other intersting free software project to
contribute to.

I too am concerned about Kaffe getting a license incomaptible
with free software.  (But then I have written non-trivial
code, and my company has contributed non-trivial money,
my concern matters, while yours is just hot air.)  Anyway,
nothing is decided yet - the TransVirtual folks tell me
they will probably be much more free-software-friendly than
Tim's original message suggested.  We'll see.  A fork is certainly
a possibility, but in any case abandoning a clean-room approach is
nothing but foolishness if Kaffe is to be used as more than a toy.

	--Per Bothner
Cygnus Solutions     bothner at cygnus.com     http://www.cygnus.com/~bothner