Daniel Bonniot wrote:
The biggest problem is that Kaffe is licensed under the GNU GPL, so if an application/library can only be compiled with Kaffe, it must be licensedunder the GPL too (or at least be "license compatible" with the GPL).Given that this case seldom/never happens, I wouldn't say this is the "biggest" problem. I would say that the biggest problem of Kaffe, which it shares with all other open-source VMs, is the lack of free libraries to go with it (although there is great work being done in this area, and luckilly inside classpath so all VMs benefit from it).
If a debian package can only be built using Kaffe, then it depends on Kaffe and thus should be GPL compatible, according to both the debian-legal concensus and the FSF interpretation. Unless I am missing something? In other words, I would be very wary of a GPL incompatible package that has a "build-depends" on kaffe only, or a depends on kaffe only. (adding a non-working build-depends or depends does not count). Etienne -- Etienne M. Gagnon, Ph.D. http://www.info.uqam.ca/~egagnon/ SableVM: http://www.sablevm.org/ SableCC: http://www.sablecc.org/