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Re: testing before a release


From: Etienne M. Gagnon
Subject: Re: testing before a release
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2001 11:20:41 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011023

Tom Tromey wrote:

Are you referring to companies which make embedded projects using
libgcj?  Yes, it's true -- they use libgcj (and thus parts of
Classpath) and don't redistribute source.


For months, every time a question was asked on the Classpath list about the meaning of the GPL+exc license, the aswer was that it was equivalent to the LGPL minus the problem of providing .o files of proprietary modules. Paul Fisher, one of the leaders of this project, asserted that redistributing sources was indeed required. Everybody, on the Classpath side, was convinced that this license was more protective than the BSD license. (Please search the Classpath mailing-list archive, if you don't trust me).

Because I have been questioning this interpretation higher and higher, until I went to the top and ask RMS, I finally was able to get a clear answer on this, which seemed to match my reading of the exception text (and your interpretation).

I think that hiding this fact from Classpath developers, if it was not for a "hidden agenda" to get contributions from all Classpath contributors for making money **=> without redistributing sources! <=**, at least it was not a well advertized to Classpath contributors. But, maybe it was just a misendurstanding, with no hidden agendas.

Now, Let's stop this war. I will concede that it was probably not a hidden agenda; it was simply miscommunication. Happens all the time.

What I am currently proposing is to accommodate everybody, with a license which will be nice to: 1- Static compilers (gcc) + Embedded systems developers (linking exceptions + clarification)
2- Library (+ VM ?) developers (LGPL+exc)

How about it?

Etienne

PS: One day I hope Classpath will also start accepting non-FSF copyrighted code, but this is another battle to have or to avoid by continuing the fork.

--
Etienne M. Gagnon                    http://www.info.uqam.ca/~egagnon/
SableVM:                                       http://www.sablevm.org/
SableCC:                                       http://www.sablecc.org/




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