Jim White wrote:
Jim Pick wrote:
...
The GPL license is somewhat undefined in terms of how it interacts with
other code. It's not a license I would have chosen for a virtual
machine. Some people say if you run an application on top of the VM,
you would have to make that application GPL-licensed too. Some people
say that's nonsense (I tend to agree with that viewpoint).
That is clearly FUD.
I mention it because that was Transvirtual's old position. Yes, I
believe it to be FUD too. :-)
I'm just trying to lay out the situation and the history so that people
can make an intelligent decision themselves as to whether or not there
is a legal risk for them.
I would love to be able to say there is no risk that somebody using
Kaffe would ever be sued, but I'm not a lawyer (and I doubt you could
ever get a lawyer to say that either). Remember, companies like SCO
will sue people even if they have no legal basis for a case.
I didn't even mention the messy situation with software patents,
particularly in the U.S., and possibly Europe, soon... Who knows what
patents companies like Sun, IBM, Microsoft and others are holding that
might apply to our implementation?
GNU explicitly says that is not the case, and if
it were the case then any non-open source application running on Linux
would be in violation.
True, and the Linux license also adds a clarification to make that
very clear.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#PortProgramToGL
The lack of undue dependency for VM's made clear here:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InterpreterIncompat
The poster's original question is also answered by GNU:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TheGPLSaysModifiedVersions
The same page also says that subclassing a GPL'd java class is creating
a derivative work. Kaffe's class libraries were GPL'd. We've almost
completely moved over to using the Classpath projects class libraries,
which are GPL+Exception, so hopefully that will provide some more
license insulation. :-)
Cheers,
- Jim
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