Hi,
There are some problems with the next release, with the decision from the ASF board to mandate that all ASF releases are to be made of 100% ASL 2.0 licensed components (as a side note, I'd like to add that this is obviously a terrible decision). This has many consequences and some questions marks are left (such as for the JCP provided elements we are using).
With Tomcat 5.0.x, the most pressing problem is with JMX, since there are no ASL 2.0 licensed implementations available.
The options seem to be:
A) Ship Tomcat 5.0.20 without JMX, and have it display a message with instructions on how to install JMX if it's not present (basically, everywhere but on JDK 1.5.0).
B) Ship the binaries from non ASF servers (we could setup a project for that on Sourceforge). The sources can be shipped from the ASF servers as before. It is unclear to me if we can legally call these binaries Apache Tomcat or not.
Comments ?
I send a note about this limitation to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and hope to see the board relax its position.
Here's what I send to the list :
> It seems worthwhile to state something that probably most people are aware
> of, but a few recent incidents suggest is worth repeating. Followups are
> being directed to [EMAIL PROTECTED], a list that is private to Apache
> committers, where legal issues are discussed. Please subscribe to that
> list (requires approval) before posting to it.
>
> First off, thank you to everyone who has transitioned to the new Apache
> License 2.0. It is a board mandate that *all* software distributed by the
> Apache Software Foundation be under this new license. This has some
> subtle and not-so-subtle ramifications people should be aware of.
>
> *) Only software packages created by the Apache Software Foundation may be
> redistributed from Apache's servers and mirrors. This means no tarballs
> or binaries from other authors or organizations. We realize that many ASF
> projects depend upon other software, and that these dependencies may make
> it difficult for new users to bootstrap quickly. There are solutions to
> that problem outside of the ASF: ibiblio, sourceforge, CPAN, etc. The
> board might grant exceptions to this rule - bring it to us if you'd like
> us to consider it.
Should I understand that we could no more include third-party jars in ASF products, for example mx4j jars in Tomcat ?
If it's the case this decision will put many, many users in big trouble since they couldn't use anymore ready-to-run package (zip or tarball containing everything needed for run).
As one of the founder of the JPackage Projet, www.jpackage.org, which try to maintain a repository of java applications and libs, let me say that the task is not so easy, and for now works only on RPM based boxes, mostly Linux.
What should do non-RPM users ?
I could understand the board concern about incompatible license, but when developpers select third-party software to make ASF products, they take care of it isn't it ?
So I strongly suggest board to reconsider this point or we may see in a near future ASF products distribution, containing both ASF and required third party software, outside Apache servers and it will not help users to find their way.
Am I exact in thinking that the original ASF goal is to provide real products for real users, and that we should take care of users as much as we take care of performance, stability ?
Regards
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