The use of Maven with Checkstyle is prominently listed on their site. Has anyone in the past discussed the license with them? (ie changing it to Apache friendly?)
-----Original Message----- From: Brett Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 6:47 PM To: Maven Developers List Subject: Re: Checkstyle, maven-checkstyle-plugin and LGPL 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 > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
