Does anyone have a real example where a commercial software vendor has
actually refused to allow someone to adjust the bundle Manifest of their
licensed bundle so that it would work better in an OSGi environment?
As a commercial software vendor, I can quite honestly say:
* We include numerous 3rd party JARs, some commercial, in our OSGi
bundle set and in no case has any software vendor refused to allow
us to change or add to their manifest even if their license did
not explicitly grant this right
* Frankly we could care less if someone wants to modify bundle
manifests of any of our JARs, even if doing so is against the
letter of our license. As long as they are making legal use of our
software, and paying us any requisite fee we're happy to have them
as a customer. Ok, if their changes break something we might not
cover helping them fix it under standard support - but aside from
this, the widest possible legal use of our software is fine with us.
Simply changing a manifest (esp. the import / export parts) may not be
strictly legal - but I suspect most vendors won't object if you explain
your needs and ask for permission. You wouldn't be getting any usage or
redistribution rights out of doing so, but you'd be making use of their
software which is what most vendors want!
Regards
-- Rob
