On Fri, 2003-06-27 at 05:38, Dalibor Topic wrote: > Anyway, this has been done to death every couple of months, and my conclusion > is: > * I don't really know > * if you don't know either but have to know ask your lawyer > * none has complained yet > * transvirtual was fine with everything running on top of kaffe, see > http://web.archive.org/web/20020220084736/http://www.kaffe.org/FAQ.html#proprietary. > * it would be very hard to relicense everything now, since transvirtual is dead
That's basically where I'm at on the issue as well. I'll add some more comments to this thread, since I think it summarizes the issues quite well, and I don't want to write a FAQ.Licensing. :-) Where we want to go on the licensing is to realize that the GPL licensing is a small bit of an impediment to us, imposed on us by Transvirtual/FSF dealing in days gone past. GPL+Exception would be ideal, but the only way to do that is to throw away all code that was contributed to us under the GPL. I don't want to do that. I guess what I'd like to add to this thread is that it would be nice if new contributions to class libraries and such came in under non-GPL licenses, and we keep track of those. If people contribute their changes to Classpath, which is GPL+Exception, that does it for us automatically. But Kaffe can also take code under other GPL-compatible licenses (eg. BSD-style), and does not require copyright assignment, so we can take additional contributions that Classpath can't take. Ultimately, we're trying to be greedy, not pure, and if somebody wants to contribute pure GPL code for something, we aren't going to say no. This might provide a vehicle for some people doing a research project, or a business that wants to relicense their code to get their code out there -- but still leave the door open to selling their code commercially under an alternate license (it's a pretty tough business model though, as Transvirtual will testify). I don't know if there is much point in trying to get away from GPL contributions for the core virtual machine - those contributions would be hard to separate out and use in an alternate VM project. If somebody does want to do a contribution to the core virtual machine under a non-GPL but GPL compatible license, so it could be reused elsewhere, we should respect that, and clearly mark the alternate licensing terms on their contribution. I don't think we should try to ditch the current VM stuff, and go back to the old BSD licensed version of Kaffe, and try to reimplement everything since Transvirtual did the switch to the GPL license. If somebody (or a company) feels so strongly about the licensing issue that they'd like to start maintaining the old BSD licensed version of Kaffe again, I'd be open to letting them use Kaffe.org's resources to do a "fork", maybe under another name, so it doesn't confuse people. There are already lots of VMs based off of Kaffe, so that's something we like to promote. Cheers, - Jim _______________________________________________ kaffe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kaffe.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kaffe
