On Nov 24, 2007, at 2:45 AM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:What is the feeling of the developers here about using JFreeChart: http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/ Here is the GNU Lesser General Public Licence license: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.htmlthat it utilizes. I am writing the screens for an AR collections tool and want to present the last 6 to 12 months of sales and a picture (bar chart inthis case) is worth a thousand words. Can a commit which uses JFreeChart be accepted?Yes, it is acceptable, but, have a look at this page: http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBADMIN/Libraries+Included+in+OFBiz because there are some notes about LGPL libraries:"We can use, but can not include, libraries licensed with LGPL. The licensing quirk here is that we can write code that uses the libraries but can't include (distribute) the libraries themselves. This means that we have to have the build.xml files out of the box with exclusions for these source files. For each one we should document which jar files are needed, where they can be obtained, and which build.xml file(s) need to be changed to compile the Java files that depend on them."
This is the correct legal side of things for LGPL libraries.From a practical perspective because of this LGPL libraries are a real pain and unless there simply is no alternative we don't really want them in the project.
You don't have to read the mailing lists very long to see that the size and complexity of OFBiz is a big problem for lots of people. We have tried to simplify certain things to soften this blow (not possible everywhere, business requirements do tend to get complex) and the install and run process is a big one of those. Requiring the separate download and insertion of LGPL libraries and changing build files adds a lot to the difficulty of getting whatever requires the library to a functional state, and also tends to result in lots of questions to the mailing list for help getting it working, and complaints that it isn't working.
In short it is allowed but because of this strongly discouraged. -David
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