On 4/10/07, Brett Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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).
Technically I think there may be the need of an adapter.
It looks like the Apache code cannot directly link to the LGPL checkstyle.
So there should perhaps be an interface in the plugin and an
implementation adapting Checkstyle to this interface. The
implementation would be LGPL. The user would reference the checkstyle
wrapper, not checkstyle.
Otherwise if checkstyle directly plugs into the plugin, then the
plugin is a sort of derived work and that depends on the
interpretation of the LGPL.
Another solution would be for checkstyle itself to provide an apache
friendly API (extracted from the implementation) and the plugin to
only import elements of that interface.
Am I wrong ?
J
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