Bertrand Delacretaz wrote:
Sounds like the way to go, intelligently downloading dependencies from some non-ASF repository should solve most, maybe all of the licensing problems, and help make Cocoon more lightweight for many uses.
IIRC last time this was discussed the debate quickly moved to a heated discussion on the relative merits of Maven and other similar tools - if we're going to discuss this again, we must be careful to focus on the goals rather than on the tools!
Isn't this missing the whole point of the current licensing discussion? If we cook up a system that allows us to create and distribute cocoon but that product now cannot be used to build a commercial application without questions of further license requirements (source code availability, etc.) have we served our users well?
wait!
let's keep reasonable here, ok?
We are distributing cocoon today and it's *already* a legal hell to go thru to find out how to package cocoon in a commercial product and redistribute it. The cocoon *code* is licensed under the apache license, the libraries are licensed according to the /legal directory, as we specify in the README file.
Brian thinks that this is not enough and yields the false impression that *everything* is licensed under the apache license.
Not everybody agrees with him.
But due to the nature of cocoon, installations are just that: installations.
99% of our users do not redistribute cocoon as part of their system. They use it to provide a service. And, if they do redistribute cocoon as a part of their software, they will need to comply to *ALL* the licenses that we ship.
[but since we did the job for them to screen the compatibilities, they have to make sure that they comply to the other things, like IP and patent rights]
If we do not redistribute, say, Rhino, this makes it more obvious that they have to comply to the license because they have to download it themselves... but if we do it thru a package manager, well, it's the same thing.
IMHO, stopping distributing libraries under the MPL doesn't buy us nothing, the legal issues are all already there, we should just make it more obvious when the user downloads our distribution.
NOTE: legal issues are nasty with IP and patents anyway. Open source is not freeing you from living in the real world, unfortunately.
-- Stefano.
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