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Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe



Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:

I am.  I'm not talking about the .deb file containing Eclipse.  If you
think you can provide someone with the Eclipse IDE program without
providing a JVM, I invite you to try.

You mean like Fedora? Eclipse 3 nicely compiled to native with gcj, yum, and balzing fast, for all I've heard. I wish debian had better gcj support. :)

When I instruct my computer running the Debian OS to load and run
eclipse, the code from some JVM package and the code from the Eclipse
package and from dozens of others are loaded into memory.  The process
on my computer is mechanical, so we should look back and see who has
designed and created this particular combination.  In this case, it
was Debian, who took the top level Eclipse component and selected
a particular JVM and particular support libraries to include.

That's the 'running is illegal/GPL puts restrictions on use' fallacy. :)

You can't violate the GPL of a program by running it. The GPL only talks about 'copying, distribution and modification', and explicitely says 'The act of running the Program is not restricted'.

Whether the GPLd program loads non-GPLd works in memory is irrelevant. What's relevant is whether works are actually copies, modifictions or derived works. Or all my e-mail would have to be GPLd, as it's loaded into the memory of a GPLd program :)

cheers,
dalibor topic



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