Re: legal question about writing mauve test cases

[Dalibor Topic <robilad at kaffe dot org>]

Greg Orlowski wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is it legal to use the reflection api's w/ sun's jdks to generate
> lists of method signatures and then compare them to gnu-classpath's
> method signatures as a reference-point from which to develop test
> cases for mauve?

I assume that you're interested in seing which classes/methods/fields 
are missing/bad in GNU Classpath, in order to figure out which areas to 
go after, you may be interested in looking at Japitools comparison 
results at http://www.kaffe.org/~stuart/japi/

> Does using the reflection capabilities of java with sun's libraries
> constitute reading source code (legally)?

No, afaict. Otoh, if you are using or writing, say, an automated test 
generator for libraries, the cleanest way to do it is to generate your 
tests against GNU Classpath sourcecode, and then to run the tests 
against a non-free VM, to see if the assumptions codified in GNU 
Classpath also exist in the non-free VM.

On a side note, CnC from http://www.cc.gatech.edu/cnc/welcome.html might 
be interesting for such a task.

> I'd like to contribute to classpath, but I'll be using sun's tools
> extensively at my job, and I'm worried that I'll be tainted by doing
> so.

Afaik, using Sun's tools does not taint you, since you don't get to see 
actual implementation details by just using java/javac. Looking at the 
sources or having a NDA/contract with Sun not to disclose their 
implementation details otoh, would prevent you from contributing 
respective souce code to GNU Classpath. In that case, there are still 
other areas one can contribute to.

cheers,
dalibor topic