Hi classpath developers! (Harmony people: replies only on the classpath mailing list please, this has in reality only little to do with harmony.)
"Oh no, not all that licensing crap again!" As part of the ongoing investigation whether the new Apache Harmony project can legally use GNU Classpath and what the licensing implications of that should be, one of Apache's resident license experts inlined some comments into the classpath exception wording: Linking this library (scope?) statically or dynamically with other modules (define?) is making a combined work based on this library. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination. (I.e., this work and anything you combine with it cannot be copied, redistributed, or made into derivative works except under the terms of the GPL). As a special exception (on what?), the copyright holders (who?) of this library (encompassing what?) give you permission to link (how?) this (what?) library with independent modules (defined later) to produce an executable (what's that?), regardless of the license terms of these independent modules (license as received or license for redistribution?), and to copy and distribute (a small fraction of the rights under copyright law, not to mention patents) the resulting executable (but what about the source libraries?) under terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module. An independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on (define?) this library. If you modify this library, you may extend this exception to your version of the library, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version (which is the same as dual-licensing with GPL). That's a lot of comments and question marks! The gist of this is that the combination of GPL + this exception has many legal holes at a glance. From what I understand (not a lot, IANAL), that is because various things in the statement are not fully defined. The first thing we would like to do is get rid of all those question marks. It's probably not productive to go through all of them. One suggestion I'd like to pass on is that you guys write up a list of the goals to be achieved with the GPL+exception construct (ideally in the form of a web page, since links are easy to pass around :-)) and some of the ASF people take a look at that and take a stab at a proposal for a different kind of wording which would be deemed to be compatible with those goals, Apache's goals with Harmony, and the Apache License, if that's possible. We can then make the three texts (the classpath exception, the goals to be achieved with the exception, an alternative proposal) subject of a discussion, perhaps via concall. Sound like a plan? Mark, I think you've got my cell if you want a high-bandwidth chat :-) Cheers, Leo
