Donating code to Kaffe

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jan  8, 1999, Brian Jones <cbj at nortel.net> wrote:

> Going back to the beginning of Classpath when we discussed licensing,
> the problem with releasing the class libraries as GPL is the GPL
> doesn't allow one to 'link' proprietary code to those libraries either
> at compile time or runtime.

GPL only rules the distribution of a package; you're free to link
GPLed and non-GPLed code as long as you don't distribute the result.
I understand how this undermines the purpose of GPL and RMS's concerns
about it, but I haven't still been convinced that GPL'ing a Java
package is any different from LGPL'ing it.  I see the difference in
spirit, but the current wording of the GPL is not appropriate to cover 
Java packages, and I can't think of any simple modification that would 
make it any simpler.

Nevertheless, I have always advised Tim Wilkinson to add a note to
Kaffe's license terms explicitly stating that linking a program with
Kaffe's classes doesn't require, by itself, the resulting program to
be distributed under the GNU GPL.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva  http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva  aoliva@{acm.org}
oliva@{dcc.unicamp.br,gnu.org,egcs.cygnus.com,samba.org}
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP, Brasil