Kaffe and that nasty licensing issue

[Tim Wilkinson]

So let me try to claify how things are with Kaffe, Transvirtual and GPL
at the moment.  We take the point about open source and nothing would
please me more than keeping Kaffe out there as a GPLed bit of software.
On the otherhand I have paying customers who really don't want to see
their investment given to their competitors for free.

So, at the moment we'll certainly be making release of the VM under
GPL (no more Berkeley I'm afraid since we've been rucked on that license

too much by large companies who never gave their changes back to the
community) and also making *all* our current sources available under a
slightly more restrictive license (as originally proposed this will
likely prohibit use in embedded targets but not effect commerical or
non-commercial use on other platforms).  However, we will be committed
to moving our main body of source code to the GPL over time, somewhat
like the license operated by Aladdin (ghostview) and Cygnus's internal
development policy.

In the meantime we're still investigating how to commit to GPL for all
source code as it's produced.  As a first step in this we release Kaffe
0.10.0 this morning (under GPL) as a prelude to the ever pending Kaffe
1.0.0.

Cheers
Tim

--
  Tim Wilkinson                         Tel:     +1 510 704 1660
  Transvirtual Technologies, Inc.,      Fax:     +1 510 704 1893
  Berkeley, CA, USA.                    Email:   tim at transvirtual.com