Re: LGPL possible for SHA-1 provider?

[Harald Albrecht]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Brian Jones wrote:

> The license of your software does not affect your ability to use all
> of Classpath or parts of it in your application.  If you modify some
> part, then we believe you may then be forced to distribute those
> modifications with your application.  If you make no modification at
> all from a released version you then don't need to distribute source
> or object files.


The problem is not with my own applications or not giving the modified 
sources away. What I would like to do is having the same license 
conditions or at least conditions compatible with the LGPL for the whole 
package. The CUP runtime classes my package also provides (moved to the 
org.acplt package tree) are compatible with the LGPL. I am perfectly 
willing to distribute the changes, that's why the RemoteTea package has 
been put under the LGPL. The reason for not chosing GPL this particular 
time was to avoid problems with people using these packages in their 
very own, maybe proprietary applications. This has been proved right so 
far, as companies from automotive industry, banks (those with money), 
accomodation reservation systems, etc. are now using RemoteTea and 
helped testing and improving the package.


> To answer your question, I don't think you can distribute your
> modified SHA.java under the LGPL, but you can distribute that file
> under our terms (which provide more freedom than the LGPL) or the
> terms of the GPL.


So I probably should put a special note in the README pointing out that 
the SHA class is GPL instead of LGPL. This should be okay for users as 
this only applies to the stand-alone jrpcgen protocol compiler, so 
everyone can use the protocol compiler without getting touchy with the 
GPL (no, I'm not against the GPL, and I am using it for several projects 
of my own and perfer it, but for political reasons, sometimes the LGPL 
is of more use in certain situations).


> As a side note, more than likely we did make an alpha release of the
> software containing some of this code and more than likely it was
> before we changed our license, not that this should matter much.


;) Unfortunately the alpha release did not come with any security 
provider...


--
Harald Albrecht
Chair of Process Control Engineering
RWTH Aachen University of Technology
Turmstrasse 46, D-52064 Aachen, Germany
Tel.: +49 241 80-7703, Fax:  +49 241 8888-238