On Jan 21, 2008 5:26 AM, Trustin Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I know LGPL is somewhat an old topic, but it's still puzzling me, so
> please bear with me a little bit. :)
>
> I am forwarding this thread to [EMAIL PROTECTED] just to be sure and
> find out what MINA PMC has to do with the RXTX dependency.  Here's
> some background:
>
> * One of MINA's submodule depends on RXTX library (http://www.rxtx.org/).
> * RXTX is LGPL'd with an exception clause.
> (http://users.frii.com/jarvi/rxtx/license.html)
> * We are using Maven so the generated tarball doesn't contain any RXTX
> source code or binary (i.e. JAR).
> * However, Maven 2 fetches the RXTX binary automatically when a user
> enters 'mvn compile' command.
> * We didn't tag any official release or publish any distributions yet.
>  (we have some Maven snapshots though)
> * Another worthwhile read: http://tinyurl.com/28hmfj

Regarding that last link, that resolution was tabled.  What it
eventually evolved into can be found here:

http://people.apache.org/~rubys/3party.html

> Now the somewhat overlapping questions...
>
> 1) Do we need to move our submodule outside of the ASF or not?
> 2) Is there any way to distribute the submodule with the official MINA
> release as of now?

Two questions first:
1) Can Mina meaningfully operate, possibly with a only a subset of
functionality, without the presence of this dependency?
2) Does this submodule "communicate with RXTX solely through the Sun
Microsytems [sice] CommAPI interface version 2"?

> Thanks in advance for some clear answer! :)
> Trustin

- Sam Ruby

> On Jan 21, 2008 6:25 PM, Emmanuel Lecharny <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Trustin Lee wrote:
> > > It's not a mistake.  I think we had enough discussion:
> > >
> > > http://markmail.org/message/zpjhpxlj3hul3phx#query:+page:1+mid:zpjhpxlj3hul3phx+state:results
> > >
> > This discussion conclusions were pretty clear, I think :
> >
> > "I think that the last sentence is pretty clear to me : either you write
> > your own interface, or you accept compilation errors (up to the user to
> > download the LGPL lib interface), but you should not include any part of
> > this LGPL project into the repo.
> >
> > Is that correct ?
> >
> > Emmanuel"
> >
> > "I believe so, yes. You absolutely cannot ship any LGPL code along with
> > your releases. If users provide a version of that code themselves it's
> > fine to have functionality that depends on it, although in general that
> > sort of thing should be discouraged if possible.
> >
> > -garrett"
> >
> >
> > So I think it's a mistake, IMHO.Someone misinterpreted the conclusion we
> > reached in this thread.
>
> Doesn't 'LGPL code' here mean the source code (or binary) of the
> LGPL'd library?  If so, we are not distributing anything like that
> (because we are using Maven and Maven will pull the JAR only when the
> user wants to pull it.)  If 'LGPL code' meant the code that uses
> LGPL'd library, then we need to do something to fix this situation.
> Just moving it out to somewhere like Google Code will work I guess.
>
> > > Please let me know if we need to add some notice statements in our 
> > > distribution.
> > >
> > http://people.apache.org/~cliffs/3party.html :
> >
> >
> >         "Category X: Excluded Licenses
> >
> > The following licenses must *not* apply to any software within an Apache
> > product, whether in source
> > <http://people.apache.org/%7Ecliffs/3party.html#define-source> or binary
> > <http://people.apache.org/%7Ecliffs/3party.html#define-binary> form""
> >
> > In any case, I don't see why we have a Notice Statement in the
> > distribution for a LGPL product. And we should also remove the reference
> > to this library from the mina-transport-serial pom.xml.
> >
> >
> > > In
> > > contrast, RXTX is available in the official Maven repository and very
> > > stable and mature in what it's supposed to do.  What we need to do is
> > > to tell users that it is a LGPL'd library, and that's why
> > > LICENSE.rxtx.txt is there.
> > >
> > There are two different things :
> > - you can tell users they can use a LGPL library, on there own behalf,
> > - but you can't distribute the code which does that.
> >
> > We have had the very same problem at Directory with BDB : the conclusion
> > is that if we want to distribute a BDB backend, then it has to be done
> > out of the ASF.
> >
> > Hope it helps, and that I'm not totally wrong...
> >
> > PS : in any case, the best to clarify this situation, as the chairman,
> > would be to push this question to [EMAIL PROTECTED] I don't know if it has 
> > been
> > done last year, but I think it should have ...
> --
> what we call human nature is actually human habit
> --
> http://gleamynode.net/
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