Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Dalibor Topic <robilad@kaffe.org> wrote:
> Walter Landry wrote:
> > If I give you a CD with Eclipse and Kaffe on it, I have given you a
> > whole work which will edit programs.  You may not even know what Kaffe
> > is, but if you don't have it, Eclipse is not going to run.  That sure
> > sounds like it makes up part of the whole which is an IDE.  This
> > relationship is well expressed by Debian dependencies.
> 
> Under your intepretation all of debian must be GPLd as none of it will 
> run without the GPLd kernel. That makes GPL violate DFSG and non-free. 
> What a fascinating mess.

The kernel has an exemption.  This has been pointed out more than
once.

> > Now, it is true that Eclipse will run with other JVMs.  But if they
> > are not on the CD, then it doesn't matter.  The GPL cares about what
> > it is distributed with, not about stuff it could be distributed with.
> > And the only thing allowed on the CD is stuff in main, because this
> > whole argument is over whether Eclipse can go into main.  Not whether
> > Eclipse is distributable at all.
> 
> The other VMs are on that CD, because they are in main already.

There are no JVM's on that CD that will run Eclipse.

>   > There are a few ways to fix this whole issue
> > 
> >   1) The Kaffe hackers get the library exemption added to _all_ of
> >      Kaffe.
> 
> Not even the FSF has such an exception for their interpreters (Bash, 
> Make, Less, ...) and that doesn't make their intepreters undistributable 
> along with non-GPLd data in Debian. Why should Kaffe need such an 
> exception for all of it?

Because there are non-GPL equivalents for Bash and Less (and I don't
think there are many programs that Depend: on Less).  There may be
GPL-incompatible programs that depend on Bash specific features, in
which case bugs should be filed.  I can't imagine there are that many.

I don't know of any GPL-incompatible programs distributed by Debian
that depend on Make during execution.  At build time is a different
issue.  I am not claiming that the result of running Make on a
makefile is necessarily derived from Make.

> >   2) The gcj or sablevm hackers get Eclipse working.
> 
> I too, would prefer to see sableVM hackers get their VM fixed instead of 
>   raising fear, uncertainity and doubt about the legal status of using 
> and distributing Kaffe.

And I would appreciate it if Kaffe hackers would stop complaining
about sableVM.  It is a grand distraction from the issues.

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu