Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe
On Fri, 2005-14-01 at 20:56 +0100, Dalibor Topic wrote:
> 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 :)
Your email messages do not contain calls to GPLed functions, do they?
It's quite a stretch to compare "dead data", like text, with something
as dynamic, as bytecode, which not only can be created, modified,
translated or interpreted by a JVM, but it can also explicitely make
use of JVM functionality (which happens to be GPLed in case of GPLed
JVMs).
The analogy you gave sounds broken.
Grzegorz B. Prokopski
--
Grzegorz B. Prokopski <gadek@sablevm.org>
SableVM - Free, LGPL'ed Java VM http://sablevm.org
Why SableVM ?!? http://sablevm.org/wiki/Features
Debian GNU/Linux - the Free OS http://www.debian.org
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