I would like to hear the current wisdom regarding licensing issues of proprietary Java applications running on Classpath and the free VMs. We'd like to support proprietary applications.
Kaffe, according to kaffe.org, is GPL. There is disagreement about whether that allows running proprietary Java applications (which may include native C/C++ methods in shared libraries). It probably does, but you'd want a lawyer to evaluate the issue.
GCJ's runtime uses "GPL + exception" which is intended to allow use with proprietary code, even for embedded systems (when LGPL causes problems).
To expand on Dalibor's point:
> In reality, there is no such thing as a Java standard: tha language, > library and virtual machine specification haven't been blessed by > any standards body.
Even Sun doesn't have a specification of the libraries: The specification is the implementation (combined with some testsuites that Sun still won't make available to Free Software projects).
> i) RedHat's enterprise linux distribution uses GCJ to build important > java enterprise apps like tomcat as native applications.
Fedora Core 2 will also supposedly include GCJ-based Tomcat etc.
--
--Per Bothner
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://per.bothner.com/
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