Which library implementation to use/work on?

Wed Mar 14 11:11:00 GMT 2012

>> I understand the reasons for this policy. However, as you are planning
>> on (eventually) replacing Classpath with OpenJDK completely, an
>> exception in this case would seem to make logical sense. The code will
>> end up not owned by the FSF no matter what.
>> Well, no. The FSF will still own Classpath.

Yes. But drawing a line in the sand and saying "after this point, we
no longer have the ability to relicense as we wish, but that's OK
because we don't care about this codebase anymore" seems prudent as a
migration strategy.
My basic issue is, given license compatibility, reimplementing things
purely so the FSF has the option of relicenseing a codebase that it
probably never will is not a good use of time. In practice it just
means people won't submit patches because unless they're working on
AWT or some other library where copy/pasting code is hard, it never
makes sense to upstream patches. That in turn makes it harder for
people to benefit from those patches.