At 07:53 PM 2/6/2003, Sam Ruby wrote:
I appreciate why the ASF believes the GPL and LGPL are incompatible with the Apache license, but I think I need a few clarifications on edge cases. Apologies if this has been dealt with ad infinitum before.Dan Diephouse wrote:ASF projects can use GPL/LGPL code during the build process so long as there is no runtime dependency in the code produced. Programs like checkstyle are OK. Imports of classes covered by GPL/LGPL are not. This last statement needs to be interpreted as a transitive closure. Moving graph from jakarta commons sandbox to werken would not make it OK for Maven to use graph.2. Can ASF Projects use GPL/LGPL Projects? Yes. But, they cannot distribute them.
First, imports of incompatibly-licensed code are verboten but calling out externally to Java running a main method is alright, correct? This is effectively the same as running an external GPL executable like CVS.
Second, can we optionally load incompatibly-licensed code dynamically at runtime? So long as it is not required, and would only occur if the user already had the package locally? For example, we might have an abstract factory that dynamically finds whatever JAXP-compliant parser you have on the classpath. Would it be a license violation to allow it to find an LGPL'd parser?
Third, if the above is allowed, how about optionally compiled code? Ant's build.xml already conditionally compiles code based on the classes available in the classpath. Would it be a license violation to have code that imports LGPL classes but that is compiled only if the classes are on the classpath of the user doing the build? I understand that it couldn't be in any builds produced by Apache, of course.
Finally, I went into the top source code directory in Ant and ran:
grep --recursive -0 '^import ' * | cut -f 2 -d " " | sort | uniq
and got some packages that surprised me (that is a zero, not a capital O, btw). Other than the GPL and LGPL, are there other licenses that would prohibit imports that we should be concerned about? Clearly Sun's click-through licenses don't qualify, or we couldn't import any of the java.* classes. But what about others?
I suspect that neither 2 nor 3 are allowed, but would appreciate an official opinion.
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