On Fri, Jun 18, 1999 at 12:38:25PM +0000, Stuart Ballard wrote:
> I followed up and got confirmation that this would be under the apache
> license, and not the community source "stuff" (resisting the temptation
> to use a stronger word ;) ). Does this have any implications for our
> servlet stuff? Could they be rolled together? I know that ours are under
> the LGPL, but since this is true open source from sun, it might be nice
> to make a public show of support for it... it might encourage them to
> move further in this direction later :)
I already asked on the jakarta general mailing list about this since
Paul Siegmann and I maintain the javax.servlet.* classes.
(Those classes are not yet part of Classpath since it took us so long to
send the paperwork to the FSF. And I am a bit afraid that they never
arrived since I haven't heard anything about it.)
Brain Behlendorf (One of the core Apache developers) and James Duncan
Davidson (Sun Servlet API developer) said that they hope that this will
benefit as much projects as possible and they believed that the Apache
license was (mostly) compatible with the (L)GPL. I am not really sure
about this, so I have asked Paul Fisher if he could look at this.
Since this could affect/benefit a lot of Servlet related projects which
use GPLed code such as GNU Paperclips, GNUJSP, GSP, WebMacro, etc.
Hopefully it is also compatible with the MPL since a lot of XML stuff
is released under the MPL and JSP 1.0 uses XML.
I did volunteer to merge our code since it would be nice to have one
single free servlet library, but Sun will not release their implementation
of the javax.servlet.* classes under the Apache License only the reference
release of the Servlet and JSP engines. So we will currently keep
maintaining the Classpath version to make sure that there is a free
implementation of those classes. (Which should work equally well with
the Jakarta project.)
But I am really happy that Sun releases at least some of their code as
free software.
Cheers,
Mark
