Open sourcing a module that connects via proprietary driver?

[Kasper Sørensen <i....@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

A colleague of mine showed me the other day some nice stuff he was working
on ... a MetaModel adaptor/module that would allow connectivity to a
proprietary ERP system (I don't wanna mention the concrete system, because
I would like a general discussion).

The connectivity to the system is facilitated with a proprietary JAR file
(available to customers of the system, but not open source). It has a quite
special way to treat the way you would do the connection. And for sure you
would need to call into their API (which is documented in the open, but the
backing code is not).

For instance you might call something like:

com.company.ERPSystem.invokeProcedure("read_table", "name_of_a_table", ...);

This would return also their specialized result type etc. In other words:
No JDBC classes or stuff like that.

My question is if we can in any way open source such code? It cannot
compile without the proprietary JAR file, so in that sense we need
something to make it a piece that can be collaborated around. My idea was
to create a stub project which would have classes, methods, interfaces etc.
with the same signatures as the proprietary JAR. But I am not sure if that
is doable? Do you guys know of other examples of doing this stuff? Is it
legal? If so, is it within Apache rules and regulations to do it?

Best regards,
Kasper