Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
The license on Kaffe does not in any way inhibit distribution of copies of Eclipse. I don't believe for a second that Eclipse is derivative of any particular JVM. But Eclipse+Kaffe does contain a copy of Kaffe. The GPL grants permission for distribution of copies of Kaffe. It does this in its section 2.
GPL 2b says that if distributing a combined work which contains a copy of a GPL'd work, then the entire result must be under the terms of the GPL. This is that case exactly.
Something that worries me about this interpretation (not to suggest that it's incorrect; I can see no fault in the logic, except perhaps that Kaffe is not modified when it is put on the same CD as Eclipse, and thus may not form a 'work based on the program', as per section 2) is that in an operating system distribution, for each possible joining relationship (for example Java byte code <-> JVM) there is a number of license combinations equal the the product of the number of works on each side of the relationship, and if even one of these combinations is of GPL and [GPL-incompatible-but-Free], the whole distribution loses permission to distribute the GPLed code.
Under this interpretation, distributing /any/ free-but-GPL-incompatible Java program would prevent Debian from being able to distribute JVMs that are GPLed; distributing /any/ free-but-GPL-incompatible JVM would prevent Debian from being able to distribute GPLed Java programs.
If it turns out that there are more linking relationships of this kind (.Net/Mono seems ripe for this kind of thing to occur), large chunks of Debian may be undistributable.
-- Lewis Jardine IANAL, IANADD
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