Mark Wielaard wrote: > > You may call me an evil bastard but I kind of like that ambiguity.
Mark: you're an evil bastard. <GRIN> > > When people are really serious about useing Classpath in a derived work where > they have to change the source code they will have to contribute that code > back to the project to make sure we make a release of the library that > includes those changes so they can just link to it. Either way we will end > up with more Free Software <GRIN>. I do see your point though. > Yes and no. I had some correspondence (off-list) with some of the Classpath maintainers back in February, when I wanted to know if it was O.K. to use the Classpath libraries in (what was still then likely to be) a closed-source project. The answer I got then was "yes, but of course we hope you'll contribute back any changes you make". I was still a bit nervous, though, because it seemed to me that if we mixed Classpath classes with stuff of our own then we might very well get infected with the GPL. So I decided that while we might sometimes use Classpath code internally on a temporary basis, we wouldn't distribute anything that wasn't 100% ours. In the end we released Wonka under a BSD-ish licence, because we didn't want to our users to have to worry about the kind of issues that are coming up here. Nonetheless I have to say that I'm glad I made the decision not to use any Classpath-derived code: if we had any in our distribution then we'd currently be in a coding frenzy, replacing it with own code before RMS made any more ah, surprising decisions. I think that if Classpath wants to get contributions from us or from any project that is not dependent on Classpath for all its libraries, then whatever licensing GNU come up with will have to allow us to mix-and-match classes: I should be able to recommend that if a Classpath class does 80% of what we need then we should do the remaining 20%, contribute it to Classpath, and use the result. Currently I would recommend that we do the 100%. Now call me an evil bastard. <BG> Regards Chris Gray VM Architect, ACUNIA _______________________________________________ Classpath mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/classpath
