Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe

[Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu>]

> It is not hard: Some distribution of Eclipse is only encumbered by the
> GPL if it requires a GPLed work to correctly operate.  You may have
> some odd version of Eclipse, but the standard releases have no such
> requirement.

While most of what you said seemed perfectly reasonable, this does
not.

Some distribution of Eclipse is encumbered by the GPL if it, that
distribution, includes a copy of a GPL'd work (and it is not mere
aggregation, which this certainly isn't).  So shipping Eclipse+Kaffe
is not OK.  Shipping Eclipse+otherJVM is fine.

I do not think anyone will disagree with this.  Can we now confine
this argument to whether a program distributed as a 
package with Depends: jre | java-runtime contains a copy of a package
with Provides: java-runtime?

I'm inclined to say no, that that is not the intended operating state,
merely an incidental of technically compatible packages -- and so even
if Eclipse had a Depends: some-non-kaffe-jvm | java-runtime and Kaffe
a Provides: java-runtime, there would be no conflict with the GPL here.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu