Geez sorry about the previous mail, that will teach me to put the adresses before I am done with the mail. Again apologies for the massive posting on this. Here goes again: Folks, Well this is one for all the lists and if some of you are on all of them then you will get this message quite a bit. So we took into account your remarks and modified the license. The modification is a "preface" just like Linux has. It addresses 2 key points. 1- It spells precisely the scope of the license and its "virality". As a "NOTE" we specifically say that "normal usage" does not imply GPL propagation. In the case of J2EE based system, the scope of "normal usage" is even simpler to grasp as it is limited to the J2EE APIs. In clear beans and applications that use the jBoss products through the J2EE API fall under the normal usage category and not the "derivative products" which are infected by the GPL. The "import rule" is still valid in the sense that if you import jboss code then you are infected by the GPL if you don't import jboss code but J2EE code then you are not infected. However the "use" definition is a bit larger as it covers the case of reflexive calls (that bypass the import) on jBoss. So that folks can't create a "technical loophole" by using the reflection package. However the "rule of import" is still valid and should guide your development on top of GPL code in jBoss. 2- It includes a copyright notice. I am not Linus Torvalds, so we copyright for the "authors" of the code, not myself <grin>. I.e. the list of authors in the AUTHORS file. In this fashion, the GPL is completely non-equivoque. Alright, onto the text: <notice-prepend> NOTE! This copyright does NOT cover user-developed components, applets and applications that use the services of the jBoss Application Server via the relevant J2EE(tm) APIs. This form of usage is considered normal usage of a container and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that while the GPL itself is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, the instance of code that it refers to - the jBoss Java Application Server - is in this case copyrighted by its authors. </notice-prepend> The board has voted unanimously on this formulation and we want to acknowlege Micheal J for early input. Now onto a technical problem, how do we automatically update ALL the files in ALL the projects :-) thanks marc
