Policy regarding external / other licensed code?

[Mario Torre]

Il giorno lun, 04/07/2011 alle 20.01 +0200, Clemens Eisserer ha scritto:
> Hi Mario,
> 
> Wow - didn't know there are such strict requirements, I'll send an
> email to Mark and Dalibor immediatly.
> 
> The licenses in question are LGPL, which as far as I know is more
> permissive than GPL+Classpath Exception, but I am no license expert.

Well, depends on the definition of permissive.

This is a IANAL understanding of the main differences:

LGPL allows hacking on the closed linked libraries, while GPL+Classpath
doesn't address this. In other words, you are free to change the closed
source linked libraries with your own version for reverse engineering
purpose if you use the LGPL, the distributor cannot enforce any legal
requirement as the license explicitly grant the end user this privilege.

The GPL+Classpath exception doesn't put this "limitation" on the
distributors, or in other wording, doesn't enforce this right to the end
user. In the real world, this is a small, but very important, difference
for the mobile and embedded market.

> I hope to get rid of Base64 encoding anyway in the second GSoC phase,
> as its a dirty hack arround XMLHttpRequest limitations, and the
> PNGEncoder class could be made an optional plugin, with the ImageIO
> based encoder beeing used if not present.
> That leaves the keyboard event handling code. If I can make it an
> independent library licensed under LGPL, and beeing used as any other
> external dependency (e.g. jetty http server) I guess it should work.

For my side, I see no problem in using all of them. I would prefer to
merge as much as possible up stream of course, but you are free to mix
all the things you like, but I think Oracle will want to enforce the
rules also on our small rogue project :)

I think is safer to ask what management thinks about this.

It's also a very good proof of some of our concerns, btw. I hope we can
address this somehow (it may be enough to do in good guidelines for now
I think) in the GB rules.

If you are really stuck, I would go for the IcedTea temporary repos,
especially to host the dependencies, but I would prefer to not fork
cacio if possible, even if all the code was written by me and Roman,
it's still a "Sun" sponsored project.

Cheers,
Mario