At 09:12 4/11/00 -0600, you wrote:
>
>Peter wrote:
>>
>> No offense intended and sorry for not responding
>> properly first time ;)
>
>I understand your reaction now that you've explained it to me. Let's
>start over. I actually found Rickard's post, by the way, so we should
>be able to make progress.
kewl ;)
><PREAMBLE TYPE="skipable">
>
>I'd like to see the latter happen first; Rickard and Aaron are
>advocating the former:
>
>Rickard wrote:
>>
>> I must agree with Aaron on this one: BSD is the only way we
>> can do this legally.
>
>I'd like to be convinced that that this is really the case. I
>personally feel that the GNU licenses are important enough that
>we should verify our concerns before we go stampeding off to the
>land of demons and their pointy little forks.
Well there are other alternatives. The artistic (aka satans spawn) and
mozilla aswell. I believe mozilla is closest to what you want (thou I don't
know because I have never used it before). Artistic license should be
shunned at all costs ;)
It really depends on what you want to do with your code. Consider the code
bases Linux (GPL), GCC (GPL), X Windows (X license), Apache HTTPD (APL) and
*BSD OSes.
X Windows has the most free license and you can do almost anything you want
with it. It was architectured this way so that the most people could use it
and as a result many commercial and free projects did. Some would say that
this is the sole reason X has become popular. People usually use X code to
extend/enhance it.
GCC is relatively self contained package that needs little extention and is
a core asset. People did not need to integrate with it and thus were fine
using it when it is GPLed. Along with Linux this is the most restrive
license. Very few people have had a problem with it's license thou
ironically I believe cygnus created a closed source toolkit by employing
gcc team.
Linux is GPL and has very few exceptions (except for drivers down in bowels
of OS) and people haven't complained about that. The reason is that is a
core asset and very few people need to integrate with it (relative to
number that use it).
Apache HTTPD is under second most restrictive license but allows a lot of
freedom (as long as you don't use Apache trademark and give credit). As a
result many people have been payed by their companies to work on it and in
fact the vast majority of contributions to jakarta/java apache projects are
done by people payed to do so.
BSD license v2 is what *BSDoses are under and is almost as free as X
license. Some say that if this hadn't be so we would not have the internet
as TCP/IP would never have been as rapidly deployed as it was. Many
companies include code from various BSD projects with due credit - big name
examples include MS and Apple. As a consequence of this the *BSD OS are the
most technically sound OS (thou philosophically flawed according to Alan
Cox ;]).
The question is what do you want to do with jBoss? As it is usually tightly
integrated with other components it really does not show similarities to
Linux/GCC. If you solely want popularity and quality then the free-est
license would be most applicable (Namely X license). If you believe that
you should get credit for what you do then BSD/APL licenses may be the way
to go. (L)GPL is not really viable as 90% of your code would fall under
exceptions (unless you reimplement a lot more than you have). If you want
copyleft then you can look at Mozilla (I believe thou I have never used it).
>If there really is
>a genuine problem with the LGPL, we should bring it to light,
>and send feedback to Stallman. Who here thinks the man doesn't
>deserve a well-written bug report?
well it is not a bug it is a feature ;). GNU considers it a good thing that
this sort of situation arises. For instance there is a few GNU servlet
orientated projects. To do this they wrote a clean room implementation of
servlet spec (ie rewrote javax.servlet). There is also clean room
implementations of JSP (GNUJSP from memory) and various other java standard
extentions.
GNU wants you to reimplement javax.jms/ejb/jmx/etc thou I believe that is
currently not possible as you would infringe on patents for certain
extentions (Not sure which - I just remember being told a list that
included some standard extentions associated with J2EE and other ones like
jini are off bounds).
></PREAMBLE>
>
>Can we agree upon the following goal?
>
>+----------------------------------------------------------+
>| Goal: find the specific clause(s) in the LGPL that |
>| we believe to be problematic. Trim away all the |
>| excess verbiage until only the problematic remains, |
>| then send it to the proper authority for clarification. |
>+----------------------------------------------------------+
if you want but you seem to think it is a fault of the LGPL - it is a
feature and should be considered as such ;)
>To do this we need to things:
>*) The problematic text,
>*) A statement of what we would like to do with jboss
> that we believe conflicts with the text.
>
>I'll give a first draft here, quoting from the part mentioned
>by Rickard.
>
>http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html
>Section 2; subpart b, paragraph 3
>>
>> But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is
>> a work based on the Library, the distribution of the whole must be on
>> the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees
>> extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless
>> of who wrote it.
>
>And, what we would like to be able to do is bundle jboss with
>other products, such as tomcat without imposing rude constraints
>on the license for the whole.
>
>Is this it? Or is there more? If this is the only concern, then
>I would like to point out the context of section 2, which is
nope there is also integration with JMX/JMS/other standard extentions
> "You may modify your copy...and distribute provided that..."
>
>From my hours of reading over this document, I'm convinced that
>this clause DOES NOT APPLY to bundling jboss with other products,
>provided that the person doing the bundling ONLY aggregates and
>does NOT modify.
right - no "linking" or "glue" code allowed - but how do you implement an
ejb server without linking against ejb.jar etc. Answer: you can't unless
you reimplement ejb.jar.
There is also a strong argument stating that you can not have LGPLed source
in same archive as non-LGPLed source. But there is exceptions when it is
the "other" code that is just "using" the LGPLed code.
The solution with regards to tomcat that I have sated before but will state
again unless it got lost is to have 3 archives
* jboss archive (under (L)GPL)
* tomcat archive (under APL)
* linking code + linking interface ( something compatable with APL and GPL
- usually public domain )
However you are then left with trying to find a solution to how you link
against ejb.jar/jms.jar/jta.jar etc. The proper way to do it is rewrite all
these archives but as I said you may not be able to do that due to patent
problems and you certainly could not label them as EJB/JMS etc due to
trademark violations. A lot more work and a little more hassles (you can
not claim to be an EJB server, have JMS compatability, or JMX integration).
Cheers,
Pete
*------------------------------------------------------*
| "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want |
| to test a man's character, give him power." |
| -Abraham Lincoln |
*------------------------------------------------------*
