On 16 Feb 2009, at 10:17, Gianugo Rabellino wrote:
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:42 AM, Robert Dionne
<[email protected]> wrote:
I think EUnit is now baked into Erlang so the license shouldn't be
an issue.
I wish it was that easy. Actually, I'm a bit concerned about OTP
redistributing EUnit since I'm not sure their EPL (an MPL-derivative,
I reckon) is compatible with EUnit's LGPL. Has EUnit been relicensed
and/or is there any homework from the Erlang folks that talks about
compatibility (a quick search revealed the question has been brought
up, see http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2008-December/040313.html
,
but I can't really find closure)? Know that we cannot really hide
behind OTP redistributing EUnit, as license
violations/incompatibilities are still affecting downstream users.
I would imagine the LGPL would be compatible with Apache2.0, I know
the
GPLv3 is.
Careful here. You can combine GPLv3 stuff with Apache 2.0, with the
aggregate being GPLv3'd. The opposite isn't true, though. See
http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html (which, BTW, is pretty clear
in stating that EUnit wouldn't be kosher)
The apache foundation must have a lawyer or two who could answer
this.
Indeed - I suggested poking [email protected] as a start but I'm not
sure it has been done. I can do that, if you want.
When first discussing EUnit, I left this issue intentionally open with
a future not that we need to take this to legal-discuss@, if you can
do that, that'd be really cool :)
--
My understanding of the situation is that while EUnit is shipped with
Erlang/OTP, it is not relicensed and is in fact shipped LGPL licensed*.
We are not planning to bundle EUnit itself but rely on a target-system's
installation. Running tests is a compile-time option. If you don't have
EUnit installed, you get an error. My understanding of the LGPL is
that we can write code (the test cases) using the API of an LGPL-
licensed library and release and ship it under Apache 2.0.
If my understanding is correct, we're good, but I am no expert in these
things, which is why we should ask legal-disc...@.
In the worst case that we can't use EUnit, the MIT-licensed etap**
unit testing framework looks like a viable alternative that we can
switch to, without much effort at this point (with relatively few test
cases written in EUnit-style).
Cheers
Jan
--
* I am pretty sure that the authors will happily grant Ericsson whatever
license they ask for, if asked the right way, but this has not been done
on any public record I know of. As far as I am concerned, EUnit is
LGPL, whether in Erlang/OTP or not.
** http://github.com/ngerakines/etap/tree/master
