OpenJDK and JNI -- licensing

[Florian Weimer]

* Volker Simonis:

> My only point was that I don't think that Sun's interpretation of
> "linking", "derived work" and "classpath exception" is in accordance
> with the FSF view of these terms, especially in the case of the
> HotSpot shared library which is build from files licensed under both
> "pure" GPL and GPL plus classpath exception.

There are two conflicting lines of thoughts regarding GPLed program
loaders: The first one says that loaded programs are not subject to
the loader's GPL license.  This is the stance taken by the Linux folks
for their kernel.  The second one says that the loaded program has to
be GPLed as well.  This one is sometimes cited in the Emacs Lisp
context (meaning that anything which runs on Emacs has to be GPLed).

So it's certainly a good idea for the copyright owners of such program
loaders to clarify their position on this topic.

-- 
Florian Weimer                <fweimer at bfk.de>
BFK edv-consulting GmbH       http://www.bfk.de/
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