Roy T. Fielding wrote, On 11/02/2003 3.44: ...
So if all of this is accepted, why does it matter that Checkstyle is licensed
under LGPL? It is not being "viral".
It doesn't matter. However, it also doesn't need to be distributed from the ASF servers. There is no reason that developers couldn't use it -- we use dozens of such tools for httpd development.
Please excuse me if I ask it once more, just to be clear.
In this case, that is using LGPL such as checkstyle for the build, is it possible that the build system downloads it automatically for the developer? And /GPL/ buildtools, is it different? Would it have to ask permission of the developer to download given that it's GPL (ie making it clear)?
I'm asking it again because we are talking about buildtools here, not jars used in the compilation, runtime, or linked in any way.
Possible? Yes. Recommended? IMHO, and not as an official statement of Apache policy... no.
Specifically for checkstyle, my recommendation would be to make this package optional yet easy to obtain. In Ant terms, this would translate to a separate target which does the get for you, and to make the target which actually runs checkstyle optional based on the availability of this package.
I do most of my development on Linux, and use a wide variety of GPL tools to do it. I also have been known to use fully licensed versions of Microsoft tools on Windows. None of them limit in any way the license to which the code I produce is distributed.
Being *able* to use these tools myself and *requiring* others to do so is two different things. For some people, it would be impractical or against some personal or corporate policy for them to do so. That's why I would seek to verify that there is a compelling compensating benefit before I would consider making such things a requirement. By necessity, such decisions need to be made on a case by case basis.
- Sam Ruby
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