Simon Phipps: I’m with Dalibor, and asserting that regularly FWIW. On the subject of NDAs, note that it’s not neccessarily Sun that requires for them (it can easily be a requirement for participation by one of the other EG members) and I think it’s a mistake to tie this issue to the Harmony JCK issue.
I can’t conceive of any way in which an package can be “open source” and require an NDA.
the problem.
the? There are multiple problems here.
I am no so hung up on what the schedule is for resolving these issues, but I would really, really would like there to be a schedule. A public schedule. With a public goal. With concrete plans behind it.
“I can’t conceive of any way in which an package can be “open source” and require an NDA.”
In the general case, I would say there are plenty of ways depending how you scope “package”. There’s an example in the linked mail - lying about strategy. Although the strategy in question is that related to the source, it’s part of the company’s business strategy. The package viewed internally to a company may be strongly associated with that strategy. The source itself can be open while the company may have evil long term plans for their relationship with it. Should every company (and individual) that works on open source software have to disclose all their business plans in relation to that software?
In this specific case, there do appear to be an awful lot of problems, though given the nature of big company attitudes I imagine many will have to be worked around rather than solved. Scoping does strike me as being very important - a clean line between which functional units are genuinely open (source) and which are proprietary would seem a prerequisite for moving forward. (i.e. reject/reimplement the TCKs, or more pragmatically sandbox them and any artifacts that result from them - a long, long way away from the open material).
[Disclosure: I’m under a contract which contains non-disclosure parts, and a large proportion of the software involved is open source. But I’m pleased to say the company for which I work [link] is entirely open about their business strategy. Although of course I could be lying... ;-) ]