Pierre,
The not invented here excuse? I do so wish it were that simple.
Unfortunately, it is not. Fortunately, OFBiz is way more mature than
that and the people involved are way more mature and experienced than
that.
OFBiz has well over 100 third party libraries in it and most of those
are not from other ASF projects. Also, keep in mind that OFBiz was not
originally (ie from 2001) part of the ASF, and in 2006 when we were
working on the ASF incubation the only libraries that changed were to
use the transaction manager in Geronimo.
For LGPL libraries it is true that we can write code that uses the
libraries, but we can't distribute the libraries with OFBiz. That
means we have to turn off all of the features that depend on them by
default, and turn off the build sections related to them. There are a
whole bunch of these already, and they are enough of a pain that
basically NO ONE uses them (see the ofbiz/OPTIONAL_LIBRARIES file for
details). If people had to do this for lots of libraries to do basic
things with OFBiz, it would kill the project. And, we've found through
experience that features that require these sorts of external/optional
libraries are simply not used. And for testing, we want it to be used,
preferably by everyone.
In fact that's the point: we're trying to get testing infrastructure
in place that is good enough and easy enough so that everyone _will_
start using it.
For GPL libraries we can't even write code that uses them, otherwise
we'd have to license that code under the GPL license. We have chosen
for very significant reasons to use a BSD-style license, namely Apache
License 2.0, and we don't want OFBiz to be GPL licensed. If any part
of OFBiz was GPL licensed (not allowed at the ASF for legal reasons)
then any other code in the project that uses it would have to be GPL
licensed, and so on. So, it's not an option for ANYTHING, because we
don't want it to happen to EVERYTHING. If OFBiz was GPL licensed it
would remove a lot of motivations that people have to work on it, make
it incompatible with the customizations that most end-user
organizations want to do, and basically kill the project (notice how
no community-driven ERP projects exist that are GPL licensed, just
commercially driven ones and they want to use GPL so that people have
a reason to buy a commercial license).
-David
On Nov 13, 2008, at 1:39 PM, Pierre Smits wrote:
Several times now I have seen statement that non Apache-products
can't or
shouldn't be used because they gpl or hpl (even worse as somebody
mentioned). That sounds like 'we don't want it, because we (as in ASF
commiters) didn't invent it.
In my humble opinion this is not kosher. If a good product is out
there and
it has an open source licence, it can be used. The only thing
required is a
set of instructions how to use and/or include it in a user own
installation
of OFBiz.
Regards,
Pierre.
On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 7:05 PM, Adam Heath <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Ean Schuessler wrote:
Cobertura is a good Free Software alternative to Clover. It may
not be
everything that Clover is but its certainly not too bad.
Except that it is gpl. There are no apache-compatible coverage
tools.
I looked :(
However, any modifications I can come up with to ofbiz, to make it
have
a plugin-type model for supporting any byte-code-modifying coverage
tool, would be under the correct license.
ps: Hint - I already have this plugin mostly done, just haven't
written
an implementation.
