Can I redistribute Kaffe as part of a commercial app as does Sun allowing integration with your application w/o requiring a separate installation? But more so than Sun, do I have to include the whole distro? I'm looking to include only a subset (personal java equivalent)
GPL says: you can distribute according to GPL. Depending on how the integration works in your specific case, your work may be a derived work, and fall under the GPL, or it may not be the case.
Example: Your commercial app is a JVMDI implementation for Personal Java. That requires modification of kaffe's VM as it is today, so the JVMDI interface would have to be GPLd. Or say, if your java app uses classes specific to kaffe/can't run on another VM then it could be claimed to be a derived work, resulting in it being covered by the GPL.
If you're just writing a VM agnostic java app, you should be fine, although I don't know for sure. There are different interpretations of how GPL applies to VM agnostic code running on kaffe: FSF says it becomes GPLd, some kaffe developers (and most recently debian-legal) say that the GPL doesn't propagate to cover VM agnostic code. A summary of the arguments can be found in this posts: [1] and[2]. If you need to know for sure, ask your lawyer ;)
Same applies to distributing modified versions of kaffe: as long as you do as GPL says, you're fine. Read the GPL to see what the GPL requires on your part. Supplying the source for the distributed version of kaffe, for example ;)
cheers, dalibor topic
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-java/2003/debian-java-200310/msg00111.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200311/msg00010.html
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