On Nov 6, 2005, at 1:16 PM, Justin Erenkrantz wrote:
On Sun, Nov 06, 2005 at 11:23:49AM -0500, Henri Yandell wrote:
So at least 5 LGPL jars and 4 BCL jars. As far as I know, we're not
meant
to have these in SVN, and that the imports on the LGPL jars are not
meant
to be in SVN either.
Correct. The official ASF policy today is "No LGPL dependencies in
Java
projects." As you mention, the board has discussed allowing LGPL for
Java projects but any resolution stating that has been tabled
indefinitely. A small part of the reason for the delay is that we've
been told Eben Moglen from the FSF will be issuing an opinion
clarifying
the relationship between LGPL and Java.
We in the Roller project and the Apache folks who helped usher us into
the Incubator were all well aware of Roller's dependence on LGPL
libraries. When we voted to move Roller to Apache, we all knew that
work would have to be done to resolve the LGPL issue. We also
discussed the worst-case scenario of replacing Hibernate with JDO or
something similar. We heard that a new LGPL policy was forthcoming, so
we entered the incubator and crossed our fingers hoping for the best.
I keep on hearing different proposed LGPL policies, so I'm pretty
confused at this point. One proposed policy said that we can depend on
LGPL, but we can't ship it. Another said that we can ship LGPL jars,
but we can't have a "hard" dependency on them. So I'm all for resolving
the LGPL issues but I want to see the new policy first. We've got a lot
of features on our TODO list and I really don't want to do unnecessary
work. Please put the LGPL issue back on the table. We need a
resolution.
In the interim, we still need to ship releases to our users. Roller 1.3
is ready for release and Roller 2.0 is close on it's heels. If we've
really painted ourselves into a corner and can't make releases through
either the ASF or Java.Net, then we should back out of the Incubator
and come back later when ASF has figured out an LGPL policy.
I really REALLY don't want to do that, so can we please get a green
light to ship interim "incubating" releases through Java.Net?
- Dave
