On 27/12/17 11:26, Volker Simonis wrote: > There are two different problems here: > > 1. It is not possible to build and redistribute hsdis.so because of > GPLv2 and GPLv3 license incompatibilities. > > This problem could be easily solved by re-licensing hsdis.{c,h} under > GPLv3. That would allow it to others (e.g. the AdoptOpenJD project) to > provide pre-built version of hsdis.so for various platforms and > versions of OpenJDK. This will be definitely of great benefit for the > OpenJDK community, especially taking into account that many popular > tools like JITwatch or JMH use or depend on hsdis. > > 2. The second problem is wether and when a program and its plug-ins > are considered a single combined program. > > This is a long standing problem [1] and without being a lawyer (which > is probably an advantage :) I'd consider the usage of hsdis a > "borderline case" (because HotSpot and hsdis dont't share any complex, > common data structures - they just pass a byte stream forth and back). > But that's just my opinion.
Right, but there is substantial functionality which depends on binutils. > We can not easily solve or decide problem 2. But we can resolve the > first problem and give everybody the freedom to decide question 2 > for himself. I believe that anybody distributing the resulting hsdis.so would be on shaky legal ground. Maybe it'd work in some countries, not others, I don't know, but we shouldn't be trying to find clever schemes to evade the clear intent of the FSF, the binutils copyright owner. > Without resolving the first problem (i.e. re-licensing hsdis.{c,h} > under GPLv3) most people won't even face problem two (if this is a > problem at all) because they simply don't have a version of hsdis. We need to seek a better way to solve this problem. Neither of us are lawyers, but I don't like it, and I would be very reluctant to be involved with any organization trying to get past the FSF's copyright terms in this way. -- Andrew Haley Java Platform Lead Engineer Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com> EAC8 43EB D3EF DB98 CC77 2FAD A5CD 6035 332F A671