On Wednesday 11 August 2004 16:09, Ugo Cei wrote: > I'm aware of this. What I meant is that the Hibernate guys (and not the > FSF) have publicly stated that their own interpretation of the license > they have attached to their own code is that you can use it from a > project that has a different license (even a closed-source one) and not > be forced to distribute your own code under the (L)GPL. > > It would be hard, I think, to state the opposite in a court, but IANAL > ;-)
IAANAL, I think that Hibernate may be violating the LGPL by assigning their interpretation. LGPLing your product implies certain things, and the FSF have been very elaborate in their wording (so that you and I don't really understand it) to make sure that, individual projects don't assign their own interpretation and that, IIUIC, anyone can act on behalf of the copyright holder. > In any case, what we are discussing is not importing or even > distributing Hibernate code, but importing (and possibly distributing) > Spring code which is contained in a JAR file that contains other > classes that import Hibernate classes, even if we don't use the former > (Spring) classes at all. It would be pretty hard to say that Cocoon > becomes a derivative work of Hibernate because of that. But then again, > IANAL. What could happen is a chain of legal nightmare, where someone brings Hibernate, Spring and Cocoon into court because CommercialA is using Cocoon and being sued by its competitor CommercialB. Even if Hibernate, Spring and Cocoon are not directly affected by such a case, it would damage ASF permanently, as the foundation is no longer considered 'clean'. > And if we really want to cover our asses against this possibility, we > can always strip the offending classes from the spring-orm.jar archive, > since we wouldn't be depending on them at all. Probability. One could wonder though, is Spring a trust-worthy liason, legality-wise? Cheers Niclas -- +------//-------------------+ / http://www.bali.ac / / http://niclas.hedhman.org / +------//-------------------+
