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Licensing clarification.


From: cefn.hoile
Subject: Licensing clarification.
Date: Wed, 5 May 2004 19:23:46 +0100

I note that the Gnu classpath license is a slightly modified version of the Gnu license as denoted by the recommended Exception clause here...
 
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TOCGPLIncompatibleLibs
 
...but without specifying any specific 'FOO' library which should be allowed to be linked and distributed outside the terms of the license, making it a pretty promiscuous license. I am pretty sure I understand the terms of the license, but I want to notify you what I am planning to do.
 
 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
 
I am a project admin on a lightweight agent platform at sourceforge called DIET http://diet-agents.sourceforge.net/ and I would like to make a java 1.1 compatible branch of the diet-agents source code. This will be distributed under the GPL, just like the 1.4 compatible version of diet-agents.
 
A very convenient way to do this (rather than changing all code which uses java 1.2 or later ) is to distribute some implementations of the java 1.2-1.4 classes - in particular some collections classes (such as HashMap, Map, Set), Comparable, Timer, TimerTask, EventListenerList and Random.
 
This means I would need to take GNU Classpath implementations of these classes, modify some of the source, (e.g to change their package since importing classes into packages starting 'java.*' is unsupported), and redistribute them.
 
Once I have done this I believe we can...
 
1) Distribute this new derived sourcecode under the GPL
(so that users can get a java 1.1 compatible version of all classes required to run diet-agents, even for VMs which don't contain those java 1.2 classes)
 
2) Distribute executables/bytecode compiled from these modified 'GNU Classpath' classes under any license terms we choose
(although we will distribute the code derived from GNU Classpath code under the GPL, we may wish to keep specific applications which use these libraries proprietary - without copyleft applying to the source of these applications)
 
Does this sound right?
 
Cefn
http://cefn.com

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