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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Reflection Mechanism on openJDK binary only under GPL+CE | 133 comments | Create New Account

Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.

Reflection Mechanism on openJDK binary only under GPL+CE

Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 04:13 PM EDT

You also can't get any comments that way (which would normally be in the
javadoc).

You could extract all of the functional parts of the API, but not the comments
that say "please only use this part in situation X", or whatever. So
its not the "entire" specification of the API, because it doesn't
include the (only socially enforced) contracts about how to use it correctly.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Reflection Mechanism on openJDK binary only under GPL+CE - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 05:41 PM EDT

Reflection can't give you the whole API

Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 06:32 PM EDT

While the binary .class files do have the names and types of the fields, names
of the methods, and the types of the parameters and return values, the .class
files do not have the explanatory text that makes up most of the HTML
documentation.
While a lawyer might argue that an API consists of the names and types alone, a
programmer would tell you that the explanatory text is a vital part of an API,
and that changing what the explanatory text says the methods do is changing the
API.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

OpenJDK documents the semantics of the API - thankyou GPL - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 07:36 PM EDT

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