Hi, On Fri, 2003-03-14 at 13:01, Chris Gray wrote: > > Have you looked at the Classpath licence? <http://www.classpath.org>
Some historical context. The Classpath libraries were under the LGPL previously. The current license is GPL with a special exception which allows static linking in some cases. This makes the copyleft rather weak. It was a compromise to get more contributions to the code. (Especially from some hackers at Cygnus that worked with embedded devices. On embedded devices it is not always easy to "use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library" as the LGPL describes. GNU Classpath is now used with gcj, the GNU Compiler for Java, to produce staticly [or shared] linked native code from java sources for some embedded devices.) I am not sure this special purpose license, as used for the core libraries, is a good choice in other situations when you can use normal GPL or LGPL copyleft. In the past people often didn't use the GPL for their projects written in the java language since there were no free compilers, libraries and VMs to distribute them with. But we now have (multiple) java (like) environments which are distributed under the GPL (or GPL compatible terms). So using the GPL for such programs is now a good option. Cheers, Mark (GNU Classpath hacker) -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
