SableVM/Kaffe pissing contest (Was: GPL and Copyright Law)
nEtienne Gagnon writes:
> Now, the question one should answer is the following:
>
> If, the Debian system includes a copy of Eclipse that is intended to
> run on Kaffe, can we claim that both are "merely aggregated"? The
> answer is no.
>
> There's quite some evidence of this. Can you install (normally) the
> Eclipse package and run it without Kaffe, on your Debian system (as
> defined above: main, 100% free software)? No.
This is irrelevant: The law does not care whether anyone restricts
himself to what Debian restricts itself to. The SC also recognizes
that many users will use non-Debian software. For example, from the
end of SC 5: "although non-free software isn't a part of Debian, we
support its use, and we provide infrastructure (such as our
bug-tracking system and mailing lists) for non-free software
packages." That infrastructure includes identifying possible
dependencies on non-free software that may satisfy the dependency of
free software.
As has been explained on debian-legal, the interpretation you propose
would mean that the GPL is a non-DFSG-free license.
The rest of your post is either intentionally or incompetently
misleading, since Java's idea of binary compatibility means that a
compiled Eclipse package does not contain any copyrightable portion of
the class libraries that provide declarations to the compiler. That
is what determines whether the binary package is a derivative work of
the class library package.
Please stop turning debian-legal into a pissing contest. Is SableVM
so technically inferior that it must compete based on faulty political
arguments rather than technical merit? Once upon a time, there was a
community known as the free software community, and it held as its
goal the production of high-quality software rather than bickering
over which free software license was better.
sablevm simply does not provide the java2-runtime virtual package that
Eclipse otherwise requires. Is that all this is about? Kaffe will
deliver Eclipse compatibility before SableVM, therefore SableVM must
prevent Debian from delivering popular software that works with Kaffe?
Michael Poole
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