Anthony Green wrote: > On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 10:47 -0800, Dalibor Topic wrote: > >>Yup. I think dual licensing with the LGPL should be sufficient for >>that to happen, >>and get us rolling forward in that aspect as well. > > > Rather than dual license the code, maybe switching to LGPL+exception > would be better. The GNU FOO+exception licenses say that you can > redistribute using the FOO license at will. >
You maybe underestimate the amount of confusion at the ASF regarding the precise effects of FSF's licenses[1] and how long it takes to get the necessary consensus for legal things :) Introducing yet another copyleft license may take a lot more time to run through the ASF gremiums, in particular since the ASF is just about to come up with rules to deal with copyleft code at all, nevermind coming to terms with the LGPL. > But what would be the point of a relicensing effort like this? AFAICT, > many people here show no interest in collaborating on a single free > class library project. I don't see that as a real problem, as economics of maintaining a fork would speak against it, and the only real way to be part of the game is to collaborate. Of course, Harmony could repeat the mistakes the Kaffe project made in the late 90s, and be in a few years where Kaffe was a few years ago: have a lot of neat, largely working code to show for some kinds of apps, but everyone left and right outcollaborating it, and coming up with better ways to do the same things. Been there, seen that, took the eventually happily dormant project over, and switched it into highly collaborative mode. One of the most requested features for Kaffe in the past 6 months by developers and distributors alike, btw, was support for using a preinstalled, pristine GNU Classpath (CVS head or release) install out of the box, since it is moving faster than I can merge in the improvements ... go figure. cheers, dalibor topic [1] To come back to the great internal ASF confusion regarding the GPL+linking exception (short: GPL+LE), looking the httpd binary downloads, I'd guess that the ASF (and most mirrors) have been shipping GCC compiled httpd binaries for a few years from ASF's servers[2], and the native binaries necessarily must be linked to (almost) verbatim copies of GPL+linking exception licensed crt code from FSF by the virtue of being compiled by gcc. Which is obviously fine, because the GPL+linking exception explicitely allows that. I assume an easy way to get GPL+linking exception through the board would be to wave a 'hold on! if we've been doing this for years, and it went fine as far as we can tell, and the FSF agrees with it, too, well, duh, let's get on with it!' flag and say that the ASF has been jhappilly shipping binaries directly using GPL+LE licensed code for years, and to codify such use as permissible in a policy. Someone should wave that flag at legal-discuss before ApacheCon, so that the board can get that done quickly, and we can finally move on without having to wait for the LGPL decision. If the good old httpd project can use GPL+LE code, why shouldn't harmony? [2] objdump is your friend. or otool, on os x. dump crt.o of respective gcc toolchain, look for the symbol names there, dump the respective apache licensed binary, grep for the symbols, compare the assembler code, and keep in mind that gcc crt.o als evolves a bit between gcc releases. I found it easy to find almost exact matches last time I checked, but couldn't be bothered to track down the exact toolchain release. The point is that the ASF may have been already shipping small bits and pieces that are using GPL+linking exception licensed code for years, perfectly in compliance with GPL+linking exception, the respective ASF committees just need to wrap their heads around it, and figure out if it's actually what they want or not. I'd say 'well, yeah, it's darn obvious, GPL+linking exception works the same by design for any $PROPRIETARY_SOFTWARE_VENDOR, so chances are it'll work just the same way for us, too, just like it worked all those years before', but then I can understand how confusing any document with the letters 'GPL' in it can be to some people, and how much harder to explain to their lawyers and managers.
