Re: LGPL possible for SHA-1 provider?

[Harald Albrecht]

Brian, Bryce, (in alphabetical order)

thank you very much for your quick replies about my question concerning 
classpath's license. I think this cleared things up and I can perfectly 
live with the SHA class having the GPL+exception license.

Bryce McKinlay wrote:

> The SHA class (and most of the rest of classpath) is not GPL!! It uses the
> GPL+exception classpath license, which is actually less restrictive than
> the LGPL. I believe there should be no problem including it with an LGPL'ed
> library, or in fact a non-GPL application, provided that you follow the
> terms of the GPL _for the SHA class itself_.


This is perfectly okay, since I once chose LGPL to allow others to use 
my ONC/RPC package even in proprietary applications, as long as they 
make the RemoteTea package available (source and classes) to anyone 
asking them. The reason I chose LGPL was that GPL was way too 
restrictive and I did not want to "fork" the GPL with exception clauses, 
probably rendering the whole new license invalid and/or unenforcable.

> The exception allows you to
> link classpath (ie: include it, in whole or in part) with whatever you like
> without the GPL applying to that code as well.


Fine. That's exactly what I need, I just asked to make sure that I can 
do this.


> You can't go and change the license on the SHA class to be LGPL. That would
> effectivly be making the license more restrictive (taking away some
> rights) for your modified versions of the class.


I misunderstood the exception clause in that sense that it would 
actually result in a license more restrictive than LGPL. So that's why I 
asked. My intend was never to "upgrade" form classpath's license to a 
more restrictive one, taking away rights.

Regards,

  Harald


--
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