Salut Daniel, Etienne, Daniel Bonniot wrote:
I was asking you a yes or no question about what you meant in your message: you agree the GPL would only apply to programs that can run only with Kaffe, and cannot run with, say, Sun's JVM? Looking at the message you linked to, I would assume yes, based on:"A given java program does not require this class library in order to function, because it will also work with a range of other class libraries from different vendors, and therefore is not a derivative work. Therefore, the GPL does not cross this so-called "interface boundary" to which you agreed, stressing the "range ... vendors".The other question might rather be to Dalibor: do you know of any program that falls into that category?
I'm not aware of any programs in Java that require kaffe's class library in order to function, and won't function with other (possibly non-free) class libraries. Following from that, I'm not aware of such programs that are not licensed under the GPL.
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).
It's an interesting question whether compilation with a GPL'd program causes the output to be GPLd. I don't see an FAQ entry on the FSF page for that, so I'd propose to take the discussion to debian-legal, if necessary.
cheers, dalibor topic