On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 05:57:54PM +0100, Dalibor Topic wrote: > Now, before you go off ranting about Kaffe's native libraries, please > take a moment to let the fact sink in that while these native libraries > are the result of Kaffe developers being a somewhat clever bunch at > developing software and having heard about benefits of seperating one's > program into sepearte modules, those modules are nevertheless *a part of > the interpreter*, and as the copyright law law says, the GPLd > interpreter can't impose restrictions on its input. They even get > compiled in statically on Debian for debian's kaffe package. This part is overstated. As components of the interpreter, they don't impose restrictions on programs run by the interpreter. However, this does not exempt those programs from any other relations to this code. Programs which run on the interpreter may or may not be derivatives of the native libraries (for any given library and program, they probably aren't, but it is possible for programs to exist which are derivatives of some given native library). If they are, then the GPL crosses that connection independently. The fact that it's part of the interpreter just isn't relevant. Given that eclipse runs on other JVMs, I'm inclined to expect that it isn't a derivative of any of them, but I really have no idea. That's the only question here which matters though. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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