As I understand it, this one has been in a grey area for some time.
Firstly, to be clear, there's nothing legally wrong with what it's
doing - this is purely protecting users from getting code that is not
AL unsuspectingly.
Since the use of checkstyle is optional, and because we don't
'distribute' checkstyle, Maven itself is fine. This would affect
people downloading the source code for the checkstyle plugin and
wanting to modify and redistribute it themselves, and possibly people
using the checkstyle plugin. This was a much bigger issue in Maven
1.x where the checkstyle plugin was actually distributed.
My intent was to wait for the legal policy to be finalised (which to
my knowledge, it still hasn't been, though it's probably as final as
it'll ever be), seek clarification on how this use case is actually
handled, and make the required changes in the current code to
accommodate it. There should be no need to move it.
This probably involved:
- users accepting the LGPL license on first run of the checkstyle plugin
- consumers accepting the the LGPL license on first building the
checkstyle plugin
I think we had some ideas for more widely implementing this in Maven
itself, but we could certainly put something into the current
checkstyle plugin to deal with it.
The other option is for the checkstyle plugin to not automatically
download checkstyle, and make the user, in knowledge of the license,
add it to their POM as a plugin dependency (or configure the version
they want to use and have the plugin download it, which may be a
useful feature regardless).
- Brett
On 09/04/2007, at 5:03 PM, Jason Dillon wrote:
Hey, I was just looking around at Checkstyle and noticed that it is
licensed as LGPL. Is this legit? I was under the impression that
Apache soft ware could not directly use any LGPL or GPL licenses
software... which the maven-checkstyle-plugin is clearly doing.
The README in the Checkstyle 4.2 distro says:
<snip>
Licensing
=========
This software is licensed under the terms in the file named
"LICENSE" in this
directory.
</snip>
And LICENSE contains the LGPL v 2.1 text. The distro does include
a few Apache license texts, but those are included because
Checkstyle uses ASF software and they are required to include our
licenses in their distributions for the components used, which are
also indicated in the README file:
<snip>
This product includes software developed by
The Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/).
The software uses the Jakarta Regexp package
(http://jakarta.apache.org/regexp) and the Cli and Collections
packages from the Jakarta Commons project
(http://jakarta.apache.org/commons). The license terms of these
packages are in the file named "LICENSE.apache" in this directory.
The software uses the Logging and Beanutils packages from the Jakarta
Commons project (http://jakarta.apache.org/commons). The license
terms of these packages are in the file named "LICENSE.apache20" in
this
directory.
</snip>
* * *
I personally have no love for GPL/LGPL, but I was a little
surprised when I noticed that Checkstyle is LGPL and that the maven-
checkstyle-plugin is importing classes from that package and
referening them directly... which I thought was a big no-no for ASF
projects.
Anyone know what's up?
--jason
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