Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe
On Thu, 2005-13-01 at 22:02 +0100, Måns Rullgård wrote:
> Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu> writes:
>
> > Måns Rullgård <mru@inprovide.com> writes:
> >
> >> The Eclipse authors do not tell you which JVM to use.
> >
> > But Debian does, when it says:
> > Depends: j2re1.4 | j2re1.3 | java2-runtime
> >
> > So the eclipse-platform distributed by Debian *does* call on a
> > particular JVM. And it isn't kaffe, it's Sun's.
>
> Then why on earth does the license of Kaffe have any relevance
> whatsoever to Eclipse?
Because in the packages that are being prepared currently this reads:
Build-depends: kaffe
Depends: kaffe | java2-runtime
So a user who does either 'apt-get source eclipse' or 'apt-get install
eclipse' will link (either at compilation time or at runtime) to Kaffe's
Java library, and to Kaffe JVM bindings which are all GPL.
> > Can you support this assertion? The program, including its libraries,
> > which the developer intends to put on end-user systems appears quite
> > relevant to me.
>
> If I write a program in Java (it has happened), I intend for the
> end-user to run it under any JVM of his choice. I don't care which
> one chooses. The only reason I can see for suggesting a specific
> implementation is for support issues, e.g. "we only provide support
> for running our product under JVM implementation X".
In principle you're right.
Yet, if you *package* this program together with a JVM, so that when
the user says "I want to build this package" or "I want to run this
package" the user gets your program with a specific JVM, then it's not
a mere aggregation, but these two are explicitely bound together.
And GPL also says, that the person who packages and then distributes
breaks the rules of GPL, it has no longer right to distribute nor use
the GPLed work. And we do want to be able to distribute Kaffe, for
it's very good for all GPL-compatible programs on platforms it supports.
HTH,
Grzegorz B. Prokopski
--
Grzegorz B. Prokopski <gadek@sablevm.org>
SableVM - Free, LGPL'ed Java VM http://sablevm.org
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