Bernhard Huber wrote:
yeah, gotta get accostumed to the mind recursivness of long-time LISP programmers like RMS :)hi,Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:Luca Morandini wrote:Antonio,
thanks for your appreciation.
We'd like to insert it into the next release of Cocoon, but we're not committers :( moreover, JFreeChart is (L)PGL.
In fairness though, I think licensing is not much of a problem, since (L)PGL is, more or less, equivalent to ASL and we could easily
provide some mock classes to prevent breaking the build, even in absence of the JFreeChart JARs.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Those mock classes will have to be LGPL-ed as well and we won't be able to ship them with our stuff anyway (because of ASF policies)
LGPL was written for C code. Java, being highly dynamic, doesn't really distringuish between what is a library and what is your code. And the FSF likes it to be that way since they don't like java (being a non-free language from their point of view)
One day we'll have cocoon blocks and these problems will be solved but for now, we won't ship xGPL classes from official ASF distributions.
ohhhh, i didn't thought that mocking classes has to be LGPL-ed too.
any way,The above wording is too rude and might be misleading.
as a result of all this discussion, we shall update the contrib.xml
document page.
contrib.xml states:
Source code files must be under the Apache license and must have copyright assigned to the Apache Software Foundation.
Shall we add a further item:
Source code files are not allowed to import (L)GPL-ed licensed
source code, or classes from (L)GPL-ed licensed jars.
as i'm not a laywer i'm not 100% sure if the suggestion above is correct,
but we shall detail the contribution process to help people to understand
why/why not a contribution is legal okay, or must be rejected due to legal considerations.
I would say something like this
- o -
Please understand that the recursive nature of the GPL license makes it impossible for any Apache licenced code to link to GPL code because the GPL doesn't protect the Apache brands (so it wouldn't comply to the Apache License requirements) and doesn't allow other licenses to further restrict the freedom the GPL gives.
For LGPL licensed code, it would seem to be fair to link to it, but given the nature of the Java language, there is no way to tell where the 'library' stops and where your program starts.
To avoid potential legal troubles, the Cocoon project, according to a ASF-wide policy created by the Apache Licensing Committee, prefers to avoid hosting and distributing any code that links to LGPL code because that might force the entire code to be released as LGPL, thus conflicting with the Apache license requirements of brand protection.
Also note that moch classes and interfaces don't solve the issue since they could be considered a derivative work of the LGPL library, thus would need to be LGPL-ed as well.
- o -
What do you think?
--
Stefano Mazzocchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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