Torsten Curdt wrote: > Another point seems to be forgotten in this discussion so far - the > legal aspects of distributing jars. Does the ASF want to re-distribute > 3rd party jars? Plus: based on a chat Sylvain and me had with Cliff > during ApacheCon it seems we could have blocks providing bridging code > to LGPL ...as long as we do not provide the jar and the block is > optional. (Sylvain, did I summarize that correctly?)
Yes. What Cliff said (warning: nothing official here!) is that we may allow _optional_ dependencies of ASF software on LGPL code. This is legally possible if we consider the LGPL dependency to be part of the environment of our software, i.e. a prerequisite for users that want to use these optional features. This consideration about environment is what allows commercial software to be built on the GPL'ed Linux operating system. However, to be legally clean, this requires the build system to be able to handle these prerequisites by not automatically downloading them from a remote repository. In simple words, that will require people to manually place the LGPL'ed jars in the equivalent of lib/local in Cocoon 2.1. Sylvain -- Sylvain Wallez - http://bluxte.net
