Can Java code EVER be GPLd, at all?

[Arandir]

On Sun, 14 Nov 1999, David Starner wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 14, 1999 at 06:39:55PM -0800, Arandir wrote:
> > Should anyone ever take a developer
> > to court over the single line "#include <gpllib.h>", rest assured that the
> > prosecution will lose.
> Your faith in a legal system that will consistently rule in the way you think
> right is impressive. Naive, but impressive. (Given the increasing legal
> support of software licenses, I'm believe there's a good chance the prosecution
> would win. I would also call the legal system a crapshot, but at least in
> Vegas you know the odds.)

I may be naive. So be it. But it's better to have some viewpoint on how the
legal system works, right or wrong, rather than going through life not daring to
write a line of code for fear that the dice will land wrong.

> > The lack of hard lines is precisely why I won't use any GPL'd libraries with my
> > own code. Even though I am clearly within the bounds of the law by doing so,
> > there are many, many people who don't agree, and I don't have the funds to
> > defend myself from spurious lawsuits.
> And I guess ethics never came into mind, that the authors meant something
> by their license, whether or not it can be upheld in a court of law.

I always try to follow the wishes of the author. Some people who use the GPL
believe that it's okay for others to dynamically link to their software, others
feel the opposite. Since they don't always tell me what they want, I avoid
GPL'd libraries until I know otherwise. But it is *NOT* the authors that I'm
worried about suing me.

Take Corel as an example. They wrote a GPL application that linked to both the
GPL'd lib-apt library and the Qt library. Nothing in the GPL says you can't do
this. Nothing Corel was doing would make lib-apt derivitive of Qt. Only a very
narrow reading of the GPL from a particular viewpoint would argue otherwise.
Well, you know what happened... The author of lib-apt gave them an exception,
but it was slashdot anonymous cowards who pilloried Corel.

> > Think on this: You have every freedom in the world to write Free Software that
> > uses Microsoft's MFC, Borland's OWL, Rogue's Tools++, etc. 
> Free software that can only be compiled with non-free libraries isn't all that 
> free.

For a developer who does not have the skill, interest or inclination to modify
or alter a huge complex library like MFC, they will be freer using MFC
than a GPL'd library.

> >But in the land of
> > the Free, you are not free to write BSD applications that link to GPL libraries.
> Right, providing we're talking the BSD license versus the XFree86 license.

Wrong. The MIT (X) license does not give you the right to change the license.
I can dynamically (and statically) link a GPL application to a MIT library. But
I cannot do the reverse, according to some.

> > Why exactly would you call this condition "freedom"?
> This is license-discuss, not gnu.misc.discuss. Flame bait is not helpful.

It wasn't meant to be flamebait. I'm sorry you took it that way. I was just
interested in why a license that restricts runtime usage could be classified as
Free Software.

-- 
Arandir...
_______________________________
<http://www.meer.net/~arandir/>