> I do read licenses and admit that to a large extent I am often > confused. GPL does use the term free in their license.
<opinion type="personal, not JAMES or ASF"> In order for me to consider code Free, anyone must be able to repurpose it without encumberence for any desired use. That is not the purpose of the GPL. The GPL is considered an Open Source license, because the source is available, and that is what the OSI cares about, but the use of the term Free, as in Free Software Foundation, is a complete misnomer. The GPL is naught but a Librarian's License enforcing what might best be called the Right to Distribute. It is about Stallman's response to Jim Gosling giving Unipress the rights to distribute his emacs. There was plenty of free and open software before the GPL. We called it Public Domain, and you could do whatever you wanted with it. See: http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:ModjCm17eSYJ:www.free-soft.org/gpl_hist ory http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg06653.html Companies such as TrollTech and MySQL are using the GPL specifically because it *is* encumbered. If you want to avoid those encumbrances, you have to pay them for that right. Those are hardly the only such situations. In order for the GPL to work, people have had to draw firewalls to prevent GPL infection. The ABI for linux. The right to re-use the generated code from gcc and bison without encumbrance. The Classpath exclusion. Etc. And there are still problems. Classpath adoption and development is hindered by the GPL. Linux wireless networking has been hindered by the GPL. Giving credit where it is due, the FSF galvanized many people who were already working on open source software, and gave them a focus. I don't believe that we would have as vital an Open Source industry without that focus. But at the same time, I don't believe that linux or the GNU tools would have suffered from being under a BSD-style license, especially where there are outside standards that specify what it means to be compatible. </opinion> The problem with http://www.freeutils.net/source/jtnef/ is that it is under the GPL. That means it would infect JAMES with the GPL, rendering it it unsuitable for use. You are free to write a Mailet that uses that package, but your code would be under the GPL, and we would not distribute it. The LGPL is currently interpreted to be identical to the GPL for Java due to some issues that the FSF has refused to clarify, since clarifying these issues is not in the interests of their agenda. The Classpath folks are switching to a GPL + binary use exclusion instead, although there are still some details to be resolved. --- Noel --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
