Hi Aspasia, Great to see you reaching out on this topic. Perhaps you can write on your findings, for all Clojure developers to take note? As you know I'm not developing under a free software license at work, but I did look into this topic as a Clojure developer. I specifically looked into the GPL, not even the AGPL. Let me break down your question to the different topics:
JVM It seems the GNU Classpath was used at the start of OpenJDK, but later all was upstreamed to the OpenJDK project.[1] OpenJDK is licensed under the GPL, but with a linking exception for the classpath.[2] So I don't think the JVM blocks AGPL adoption. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#IcedTea_and_inclusion_in_soft ware_distributions [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK Libraries Going through your dependency list [0], I notice different licenses: EPL 1.0: Clojure, Timbre, Liberator, Autoclave, most others MIT: Ring, Cheshire EPL 1.0 & Apache 2.0: Monger AGPL 3.0: FXC (Dyne.org project) (I didn't look them all up) [0] https://github.com/PIENews/freecoin/blob/master/project.clj If I understand correctly, the linked libraries do effect the license compatibility, so the EPL/AGPL conflict is a real issue here. Macros As a lisp, Clojure uses macro's to modify the code at runtime. Then again, the macro's are code as well, so they'll also have a license attached to them. Maybe issues arise when the code is AGPL, but the macro modifying the code is EPL. To be fair, you shouldn't be using as much macro's anyway ;) The long game would be to have a AGPL-friendly lisp platform, with similar semantics to Clojure. This could be another reason why you'd want to avoid copyleft or dual-license any libraries you put out on Clojure. Projects I have looked into: - GNU Guile: Distant from Clojure, but a GNU project. - hylang.org: MIT-licensed Clojure-inspired lisp based on Python, by modifying the Abstract Syntax Tree. - Pixie: Clojure-inspired lisp based on RPython with C-interop. I hope others can chip in to share their view, as there are probably others asking a similar question. Kind regards, Nico Rikken (NL, FSFE) _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
