Hi Kevin,
Thanks for this contribution. It will be a very valuable addition to
Cayenne. But...
> The API for these is virtually identical to the WebObjects analogue.
>
> By the way, even though the API is open, is it a copyright violation
> for me
> to copy the way I have (with all the doc comments)? I suppose I
> should have
> asked before sinking all that time into it, so hopefully I'm in the
> clear.
As we are talking about including your code in Cayenne, this is a
pretty serious matter.
Here is the story of Cayenne itself. As I already had pretty deep
knowledge of EOF when creating Cayenne, I took it as a matter of policy
to *never* look at WebObjects/EOF documentation, API, anything when
doing Cayenne design, writing code and documentation. This way I used
my own ideas of how things should work in ORM. Of course my thinking
was influenced by my prior knowledge, nevertheless if is a 100%
original work with no copyright infringement.
Of course your *implementation* is original work too, as you don't have
access to Apple's source code. But a number of things have to be
straightened for this to be accepted to Cayenne.
1. You can't just copy the docs. This IS copyright infringement. You
have to close the browser with WO API, forget about what you read there
;-) and write the documentation yourself. You wrote the code, so you
should be able to explain to users how to use it, right ? ;-)
2. Class/method naming is a lesser problem, still the fact that it was
openly copied from Apple API doesn't make me very comfortable. While we
can definitely use the "guts" of the methods that you wrote, API has to
be redesigned. You already have a general idea of how XML
encoding/decoding should work. It shouldn't be too hard to sketch an
API that would do that. How about we come up with something based on
our existing XMLEncoder/XMLSerializable, and extend those?
I too wish that we started this discussion before you wrote the code.
But we have to do it sooner or later.. We can't simply ignore these
issues. That's how Open Source works and that's how for instance Linux
can stand against SCO claims virtually unharmed.
Andrus
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Sun Dec 05 2004 - 14:47:40 EST