Hi All.I am not subscribed to this mailing-list, so please CC answers to me (if any).
In this message, I will highlight some facts. Note that I will discuss the interpretation of the licenses of Classpath, Kaffe, and Eclipse in a separate message.
Fact 1 ====== Regarding the Kaffe FAQ at: http://web.archive.org/web/20011211201322/http://www.kaffe.org/FAQ.html In this document, it is clearly written: Is the information given in this FAQ binding? The information in this FAQ is accurate to the best of our knowledge, but there is no guarantee. It is drawn from public and private statements by Tim Wilkinson and others. If you need binding information about copyright issues, contact the copyright holders.So, in other words, you CANNOT interpret the text of this FAQ as an exception to the GPL. This FAQ is in now way legally binding, and it has not even been written by its copyright holder(s) [or, more precisely, agreed upon by all of them].
Fact 2 ======In its early years, the Kaffe license was changed from BSD-like to the GNU GPL, explicitly to force people to get into separate licensing with Transvirtual, when the terms of the GPL seemed too restrictive.
The FSF did not want its own project, GNU Classpath, to harm the business of Transvirtual which was making an important contribution to Free software by releasing Kaffe under the GNU GPL. So, for many years, GNU Classpath's java.awt.* package was actually licensed under the GNU GPL *without* the linking exception. The reason was, explicitly, because the FSF believed that doing otherwise would undercut a stream of revenue for Transvirtual. I have learned of this through private email discussion with Richard Stallman, but there exists also some very public evidence of this:
http://www.mail-archive.com/classpath@gnu.org/msg02052.html http://www.mail-archive.com/classpath@gnu.org/msg02050.html3. The current GNU Classpath license makes quite explicit claims about how the FSF (as a copyright holder) does interpret the terms of GNU GPL. Here's the full text of the exception:
Linking this library statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on this library. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination. As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you permission to link this library with independent modules to produce an executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module. An independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on this library. If you modify this library, you may extend this exception to your version of the library, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version. I think that the first paragraph is quite explicit. Fact 4 ====== Kaffe's class library is composed of 2 sets of classes:1) Classes for which the copyright is solely that of the FSF, for which the license (when the *source code* is distributed separately from anything else), is the GNU GPL + the linking exception above.
2) Other classes (usually core classes) copyrighted by Kaffe's copyright holders (and maybe some code is even copyrighted by the FSF, if it consists of a mix of old Kaffe code with newer GNU Classpath code; I have not looked deeply enough in Kaffe's source code to tell; I am sure Dalibor will gladly provide the exact info if I am wrong). These classes are licensed under the GNU GPL, without any linking exception.
So, the following applies regardless of whether the license of Kaffe's C code has any relation or not with the license of its class library:
Kaffe's class library, as a whole, must be licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL or not at all. The GNU Classpath linking exception cannot be applied to the class library as a whole, unless Kaffe's copyright holders (all of them) agreed to add this exception to the license of the classes under their copyright.
Etienne -- Etienne M. Gagnon, Ph.D. http://www.info2.uqam.ca/~egagnon/ SableVM: http://www.sablevm.org/ SableCC: http://www.sablecc.org/
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