License

[Dain Sundstrom]

I have a number of personal projects I work on that I was considering using Truffle for, but my projects are libraries distributed under ASl2.  For example, Airline is a library for processing command line arguments.  I was building a small language in Airline and possibly one day using it on the substrate vm for bash tab completion.  I also work on a system for managing large clusters and I was thinking of using Truffle for the development of a control language.  Both of these projects have a history of ASL so switching to GPL at this stage is not possible.  Airline is an embedded library so using GPL at all is a non-starter.

As for my FB projects, I was working on convincing the team to use Truffle which is already a big risk given the early stages of development, but without a clear licensing story, I could not justify the costs.  As for Presto specifically, Presto will be ASL2 to integrate with the Java big data analytics community which uses ASL2.

Finally, for most other JVM languages JRuby, Jython, any maybe one day JPHP, this would not work.  Most languages on the JVM are embedded into bigger software, and the GPL would infect the business software.

If your main concern is that implementers are shipping their software under an open source license, everything I mention above is open source.

-dain

On Aug 3, 2013, at 4:29 PM, Thomas Wuerthinger <thomas.wuerthinger at oracle.com> wrote:

> Martin,
> 
> We would like to encourage Truffle language implementors to publish their work under an open source license. Therefore, we did not specifically mark API classes with the classpath exception but currently publish all of Graal/Truffle under GPLv2. In case you are thinking about using Graal/Truffle in the context of Facebook's Presto query engine [1], we would expect the license of Presto to be compatible with our open source license. Please let us know if this is not the case or would prevent you from using Graal/Truffle for your project.
> 
> Regards, thomas
> 
> [1] http://gigaom.com/2013/06/06/facebook-unveils-presto-engine-for-querying-250-pb-data-warehouse/
> 
> On Aug 1, 2013, at 5:05 PM, Martin Traverso <mtraverso at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> At the JVM Language Summit someone indicated that Graal/Truffle are
>> licensed under GPLv2 with the Classpath exception. Looking at the sources,
>> I can't find any file that mentions being covered by this exception. Is
>> this an oversight?
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> Martin
>