Re: Debian bug 120636: New upstream version available (4.0.1)

[Stefan Gybas <gybas@trustsec.de>]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 06:35:06AM -0500, Michael Bilow wrote:

> I am curious about the problem referenced about Tomcat 4.0 not being able
> to be packaged because it depends upon non-free JAR files from Sun.

The Tomcat 4.0.1 binary distribution contains a lot of JAR archives in
the common/lib directory:

activation.jar      jta.jar            naming-resources.jar  tyrex.license
jdbc2_0-stdext.jar  mail.jar           servlet.jar           xerces.jar
jndi.jar            naming-common.jar  tyrex-0.9.7.0.jar

None of them are created from source files in the source archives, they are
expected to be present when building Tomcat. The Ant build.xml file for
Tomcat 4.0 contains rules like this one:

  <target name="copy-jndi.jar" if="copy.jndi.jar">
    <copy todir="${catalina.build}/common/lib" file="${jndi.jar}"/>
  </target>

So the locally installed JAR files are put in the Tomcat binary
distribution. You have to download some of them from Sun first and accept
Sun's license. This license allows unmodified redistribution (that's what
Tomcat and other Jakarta projects do) but they are -- according to the Debian
Free Software Guideliness -- non-free, of course. So if you want to include
some of them into a Debian package this package must go to the non-free
section. This is what Adam Heath plans to do with his JBoss package but I
don't want to maintain a package in non-free.

If you want to see Tomcat 4.0 as an official Debian package someone needs
to package those non-free JARs separately for Tomcat (and others) to depend
on. Please see the thread that started at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-java/2001/debian-java-200111/msg00040.html
for details. There has also been a discussion the the tomcat-dev mailing
list about this topic. The thread started at
http://www.mail-archive.com/tomcat-dev%40jakarta.apache.org/msg15517.html

The Jakarta project might not even be able to distribute the binary Tomcat
archive because they don't include the required licenses. You could get
the impresion that everything in the archive was licensed under the Apache
license - but some of the JARs are definitely not. Even if someone made
a Debian package of Tomcat 4.0 with all these JARs included Debian would not
be able to put in into the archive, not even the non-free section.

-- 
Stefan Gybas