<board hat="on"> in fact, until such time as a clear determination is made, i'm ruling that it is *not* allowed. it is not worth the risk. so lgpl-licensed materials in the asf repositories are forbidden until a final decision is made. </board>
that may seem heavy-handed and arbitrary; i apologise ahead of time, particularly if i turn out to be wrong. however, i am saying this in good faith and in an attempt to do what's right. i will welcome an official answer no less than anyone else.
Ken, that's great. It's good to have a definitive statement so when the question comes up, as it invariably does, I can be confident in the answer.
Can I explore the issue a little bit further? The question that usually arises on Ant is not the storing and distribution of LGPL code itself, but the storing of code that "links" with or depends on the LGPL code. As an example, let's say we want to provide an SSH task for Ant (a recent question). There are a number of LGPL SSH java libraries around. The code in our respository would be developed under the ASF licence - it would consist of a Java class that merely drives the LGPL library. It will typically have import statements - something like:
import lgpl.sshlibrary.Thingy;
This code cannot be compiled without the LGPL library. Once compiled. however, it can be distributed without the library. To use the task code a user needs to supply the LGPL library independently.
So can the above code be stored in our repository? Can the compiled code be included in a binary distribution?
I'm not trying to split hairs here - these are very common questions in Ant task development. To date we have said that LGPL linking tasks cannot be committed to CVS - we generally suggest that the LGPL library develop and host the task code (whether their linkage to ASF licensed code breaks their licence is then a problem for them :-) )
The following thread is a good example of this sort of discussion:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=103833595800005&r=1&w=2
Thanks Conor
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
