Re: Help needed to persuade apaches about the Classpath license.

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Audrius,

On Tue, 2005-08-09 at 15:42 +0200, Meskauskas Audrius wrote:
> Doing web search I found that one Apache group, Geronimo project, 
> currently needs CORBA implementation, cannot find that they want and are 
> about to write it from scratch. I suggested them to try our CORBA. I 
> think it would be good; they can at least discover and report bugs, not 
> already speaking about potential prospects to get more developers. That 
> group do not want to use our work because they say our license is GPL. 
> But, if I understand correctly, this is not completely true. Until now I 
> thought that one of the reasons to have the exception in our license is 
> to make project Apache compatible, in order to join the Harmony project. 
> They seem not believe me.
> 
> Maybe you could help me to persuade that folk?

In principle the license and goals are stated on our website:
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html

In theory there should be no persuading needed since the Apache hackers
have already said that they would like to use GNU Classpath as core
library for the Harmony initiative and that the license is in principle
not a problem for adoption. The main thing holding things back is that
you need more then just the core class libraries for building a full
free j2se replacement.

That said in practise it seems persuading is needed and is not simple.
As Dalibor pointed out a while ago [1] the Apache group has a strong
tradition of debating and seeking consensus through various committees.
No decisions seem to be made unless at least three committees have
agreed on a common position/view.

What seems to work best is to point them at someone they trust as being
on the Apache side. You might want to suggest that they contact Cliff
Schmidt who also worked out an understanding with the FSF about the LGPL
so that Apache projects can depend on libraries distributed under the
LGPL [2]. Cliff has spoken at lenght about legal/license issues with FSF
legal people and knows what the intentions and goals are of our
licenses.

Please don't be discouraged if things take a little time. That is what
seems to happen when large institutions and licenses are involved.

Cheers,

Mark

[1] http://advogato.org/person/robilad/diary.html?start=67
[2] 
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-legal-discuss/200508.mbox/address@hidden

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