On Dec 4, 2005, at 11:59 PM, Dalibor Topic wrote:
[SNIP]
On Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 02:13:30PM -0500, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
On Dec 4, 2005, at 12:38 PM, Anthony Green wrote:
Whether or not you make a distinction between this kind of GPL
+exception
usage and libstdc++ or GNU Classpath usage hardly matters, since the
licenses themselves don't make a distinction.
That would only be true if there is a standard interface / component
model for the classlibrary so that there can be competing
implementations and users have the ability to switch from one
implementation to another without significant burden in the event
they wish to make changes, additions or enhancements, and have the
freedom to choose what they do with their work.
That's why I think that the our componentization efforts are so
important.
You seem to have narrowly missed what Anthony said, and went on
a defensive tangent instead ;)
You don't have to defend the usage of GPL+linking
exception licensed code by the Apache Software Foundation, all of us
non-Luddites here agree that the GPL+linking exception works as it
should and the binaries shipped by the ASF are fine.
This stuff is easy, and pretty obvious to anyone with a dissasembler,
and/or insight about C compilers, so let's have the same rules that
allow httpd to ship their binaries using/incorporating
GPL+linking exception licensed code, ASF's flagship product, after
all, be officially ratified, as they'd allow us to do the same.
Is there something left that would speak against using GNU Classpath
in Harmony, after we have established as a fact that the ASF is indeed
happily distributing code using code under the same sort of licenses
and has been doing so for years?
You are missing my point completely. This isn't about illegality as
in "We are going to get sued" or "the police are going to come" but
about the rights, freedoms and expectations of our end users.
When you get the httpd binary, you just use it. You run it. The
fact that there's GPL-ed code in there is *utterly irrelevant*
because there is no hard source dependency to which you as the user
are somehow bound. By "bound", I mean have to have it's license
effect you if you make some modification to httpd. So in this
sense, yes, it's like the OS.
When you work with the source of httpd, the creative work we are
licensing to to the user for them to do with as they may, then
*poof*! the GPL+Exception code simply disappears - it's not an issue
for the user to deal with because it was only added as a harmless
side effect of using one specific tool. It's not much different than
having proprietary code from a commercial installer being part of an
Apache Licensed distro - not illegal, and nothing the user has to
deal with when considering a modified or derivative work.
This is much different than having an explicit hard dependency on a
GPL+Exception codebase here, if our VMs would have
import org.gnu.classpath.Foo
or whatever.
I admire (or would if I had some sleep) your zeal in trying to use
this as an example to solve the problem, but I think you're tilting
at the wrong windmill here.
Either way, can we agree that we've made the Harmony community aware
of this, and bring over to the ASF legal discussion lists rather than
here?
geir
--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
