JSR 166 (Concurrency utilities)

Fri Aug 16 10:32:00 GMT 2002

> Doug, your current package says:
> Originally written by Doug Lea and released into the public domain.
> This may be used for any purposes whatsoever without acknowledgment.
> Thanks for the assistance and support of Sun Microsystems Labs,
> and everyone contributing, testing, and using this code.
>> Do you expect this to change for the final reference implementation?

No.
>> ConcurrentHashMap.java says:
>> Written by Doug Lea. Adapted from JDK1.2 HashMap.java and Hashtable.java
> which carries the following copyright:
>> * Copyright 1997 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.,
> * 901 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto, California, 94303, U.S.A.
> * All rights reserved.
> *
> * This software is the confidential and proprietary information
> * of Sun Microsystems, Inc. ("Confidential Information"). You
> * shall not disclose such Confidential Information and shall use
> * it only in accordance with the terms of the license agreement
> * you entered into with Sun.
>> GCJ is a cleanroom project, and text like this raises red flags. I'm
> hoping you can explain them away! 

Me too! These cases (this class and 3 others in dl.u.c) are
strange. I've contributed lots of code that has found its way into
1.2+ JDK java.util collections. When separately released, I always
only release code with something like the first public domain
disclaimer above. At this point it is impossible to disentangle my
contributions though especially in cases like this, where I'm basing
code on other code I wrote but never separately released. Somewhere in
this story there has to be a loophole!
(An apology/explanation: At various points I thought that Sun would
take enough steps in fixing licensing to make CLASSPATH project (and
others) unnecessary and irrelevant. I still hope this happens. I've
made bits of progress serving on JCP (see the recent announcement
about TCK availablity) and I honestly (although idealistically) think
it will eventually work out, but progress is way too slow...)
-Doug