>
> Transvirtual is motivated by the
> fact that they can relicense their code base for proprietary use and
> modification -- they of course can't do that if they start accepting
> outside code.
It is true that Transvirtual requires outside contributors to give up
their copyright (and give it to Transvirtual) if their code shall be
kept as part of the public kaffe base on TVT's servers.
It seems incorrect to say that they don't accept outside code. In fact,
I myself have contributed code to kaffe, and I count myself as outside
of TVT.
As mentioned in my other mail, contributors to classpath are also not
allowed to retain their copyright if they want their contributions to go
into the classpath source. Somebody correct me if I am wrong on this.
To be accurate, I shall repeat that the FSF is a non-profit organization,
while TVT is a for-profit company, so different motives are involved.
> >
> I was going to respond originally, but here Paul has finally said it,
> so I'll add my own comments. While sharing Java source seems
> plausible, it doesn't appear to me to benefit them to share native
> source, since they want to relicense that for whatever embedded
> systems folks are interested in buying the Kaffe solution. Since
> they might want to reorganize their Java source differently than we
> do, from the point of view of what is native and what is not, then
> working from the same Java source probably wouldn't work. The only
> possible thing I see happening is they might open up the Java source
> as LGPL instead of GPL. This makes sharing possible, though we can't
> work from the same base.
>
I don't understand all the statements in this paragraph. In particular,
I do not know what you mean by "share native source".
However, it seems that it might cause misunderstandings for people that
are less involved in the matter.
It is not true that the open edition of kaffe requires any code or object
files or class files that have not been released under the GPL. The
complete kaffe system (including class libraries, the code for the native
methods for these libraries, the VM and its subsystems) have been released
under the GPL. This includes an X11-based AWT.
TVT does not release the source to the so-called custom edition. This
edition requires licensing. It shares code with the GPLed, open edition,
but provides more functionality that the open edition does not have,
such as an AWT implementation for DOS.
It is true that the library source is GPLed, as opposed to LGPLed. This
means that anything using it would have to be GPLed as well. I don't
see how that would affect the use of a mixture of classpath and kaffe
libraries.
As for the possibility of mixing the trees or using classpath Java source
with kaffe's native functions, I agree that that is unlikely to work.
>From what I know of classpath's structure, this shouldn't be a problem
if one wants to use classpath's libraries with the Kaffe VM, once the
layer connecting the two is implemented.
- Godmar
