Re: [Savannah-users] questions about AGPL, OpenJDK

[Jan Owoc]

Hi Simon,


On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Simon Ley <address@hidden> wrote:
> If I put both client and server under it, wouldn't that mean that each
> client instance would have to offer its source code to the server if
> requested? I don't think it is appealing to the players if they are
> obliged to upload the whole client source data they are using,
> including images and sound. On the other hand, if I put the client
> under the GPL and the server under the AGPL, I would have to create
> two projects since I can only choose one licence per project. What
> should I do?

As a non-lawyer, I'm under the impression that the license covers
'code' - any images/sound the players create are not code, and do not
fall under the AGPL. I am not a lawyer, so if you have doubts, it
might be best to contact address@hidden

On a personal note, if I wrote a MMOG, and users improved their client
software to communicate with my servers software, I'd be curious about
the code modifications. The AGPL would appear a perfect match.


> Furthermore, I have read about the Java trap and IcedTea. I develop
> and test my code with eclipse under Ubuntu 12.04.1, using
> java-6-openjdk-i386 as VM, and have installed the packages
> openjdk-6-jdk and openjdk-6-jre from the default Ubuntu repositories.
> The package description says "The packages are built using the IcedTea
> build support and patches from the IcedTea project". Can I be sure
> that my code fulfils the free software requirements?

OpenJDK, IcedTea, and Eclipse are free software, so these aren't a
problem. If you want to be 100% sure that your code runs on free
software, try developing, compiling and running it on a 100% free
distribution, such as Trisquel GNU/Linux (similar to Ubuntu). If all
the packages you need are in Trisquel's repositories, then you have no
non-free dependencies (just check the license on any additional Java
libraries you need to byte-compile or run).


Cheers,
Jan