Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 01:07:16AM -0500, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
> > Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org> writes:
> > > This does depend on the accuracy of the Depends line. If something
> > > uses native (JNI) library calls that are not standardized across some
> > > significantly-multiple set of JVMs, that Depends is not going to be correct
> > > if it just says "kaffe | virtual-package-for-jvms", since most things that
> > > provide the latter don't provide the necessary JNI calls.
> > >
> > > If it *is* accurate, that means the whole damned thing is programmed to an
> > > API that is *not* owned by Kaffe (namely, the Java language standards), but
> > > rather, is implemented by Kaffe, and this means it cannot be a derivative
> > > work of Kaffe.
> > 
> > It's not about a derivative work or ownership of an API.  It's just
> > about distributing copies of Kaffe with copies of non-GPL'd works.
> 
> See above. This is really getting quite silly. We have strong reason to
> believe that the Kaffe folks *do not* interpret the GPL as contaminating
> things which are run within Kaffe (with the possible exception of things
> that use JNI calls to accomplish things which are not possible in other
> JVMs, if any such exist).

Actually, the problem is that we don't.  For some of the authors, we
have that information, but far from all of them.

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu