From: Helma van der Linden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2006 17:31:25 +0100
Guys,
I usually keep away from licensing issues, but this time I'd like to know
if it is done correctly. I'm looking at a project that is made up of
several other open source projects, cocoon is one of them, another
(sub)project is licensed under BSD.
This project is licensed under GPL. It doesn't say that only their part is
GPL and others are licensed differently. Looks like they included the
entire Cocoon source tree with licensing files for all external jars used
and they also left in the ASF license headers in the various files.
Is this correct?
Given that GNU [1] list the Apache licenses as "GPL-Incompatible, Free
Software Licenses", I've always interpreted that to mean that you can't link
to (i.e. make use of) Apache-licensed libraries (jars) in a project that
you're releasing under the GPL. They don't appear to have an equivalent
list for LGPL compatibility, unfortunately.
I do recall that previous discussions on this list have stated that
Apache-hosted projects aren't allowed to [L]GPL libraries in their CVS
repositories.
If I've got this all backwards, someone please let me know; I've a project
of my own [2] that I would have licensed under GPL if not for the fact that
I made use of libraries that were released under Apache and BSD licenses.
Instead I went for LGPL on the grounds that I can find a lot of other LGPL'd
projects that use the same libraries, so it looks like that's okay...
Andrew.
[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses
[2] http://pseudoq.sourceforge.net/
