From: Alexandre Oliva (oliva@dcc.unicamp.br)
Date: Tue Dec 15 1998 - 15:27:37 EST
On Dec 15, 1998, Godmar Back <gback@marker.cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> Does Kaffe's GPL, especially the library's GPL, contaminate the bytecode
> of Java applications running under Kaffe?
Although RMS says it does, there's no such wording in the GPL, because
GPL only rules the distribution of a program. So, if a program can
only work with Kaffe, then it can be considered derived work, and
therefore it must be GPLed. However, if the program will run on any
JVM, it shouldn't be considered a work derived from Kaffe unless
someone can prove that it was developed specifically to run on Kaffe.
So, as long as a program cannot be proven to be work derived from
Kaffe, it needs not be GPLed, because any user is free to run the
program with Kaffe, since GPL doesn't rule about running programs,
only about their distribution.
However, RMS plans to create a GNU GPL v3, that will cover the issues
of dynamic linking, and there has been a lot of debate around this
issue already. Since the current GPL seems not to contaminate
applications, it would be nice if such statement was explicitly added
to the Kaffe distribution, as an clarafication, like libstdc++ does.
--
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
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