> From: Danny Angus [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > James, > > We've had this issue in James, it is part of the wider and longer running > "jars in cvs" debate so familiar to jakarta participants, and the > conclusion > of our investigation of JavaMail was that it is acceptable to > distribute it > as part of a binary, which we do. If we couldn't I expect James would also > be looking to create an ASFL-friendly JavaMail alternative. >
This is the issue. Tomcat (and Geronimo, JBoss and others) solved this by problem for other APIs by making a clean-room, ASF licensed version of the API classes available. For things like the Servlet or EJB API this is easy because there is little concrete code. Alex is doing the same with JavaMail and this would avoid the issue with external downloads that you described for James. Unfortunately, this is a bigger task given the amount of concrete code in the API itself. > > As both James and Geronimo use JavaMail as it is intended and for the > purpose it was written I don't see why our (Geronimo's) use of it > should be > restricted by the licence, in exactly the same manner as Tomcat's "normal" > use of the Servlet API is not restricted by it's licence. > Tomcat does not use Sun's servlet binary; they have their own source version. -- Jeremy
