[kaffe] Under which license stands Kaffe´s-Classpath?

Jim Pick jim at kaffe.org
Wed Aug 27 14:37:02 PDT 2003


I think it's a noble idea to merge as much stuff as possible into
Classpath and to encourage future development on Kaffe's class libraries
to happen there.

The Qt AWT port was done by Murphy Chen and Ken-Hao Liu of Dialogue
Technologies.

However, I notice that a lot of the source files still say that they are
copyrighted by Transvirtual Technologies, Inc.  - I assume they derived
those files from the AWT that is already there.

So I think you can assume that these are going to be under the same
license as Kaffe, which is GPL.

Transvirtual doesn't really exist anymore, so it might be difficult to
find who owns the rights to the intellectual property, and to try to
convince them to relicense the code.

It's a matter of interpretation as to whether or not it's illegal to use
proprietary apps with GPL'd class libraries.  I think that's been
discussed to death on the list already.   I don't think I want to
re-open that discussion, since there isn't a whole lot we can do about
it, other than rewrite Kaffe from scratch.

Cheers,

 - Jim

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 15:12:48 +0200
"Clemens Eisserer" <linuxhippy at web.de> wrote:

> Hi there!
> 
> I´ve ported kaffe´s AWT to GCJ so that it is now possible to create 
> standalone native awt-based apps.
> Maybe even kaffe could profit, because if bugs or improvements are done 
> by GCJ-people, these improvements are still copatible to kaffes awt.
> 
> The problem is, that I ever thought, that Kaffe´s Classpath stands under 
> LGPL, but in the AWT-Files is a license-notice that points me to GPL2 
> (maybe the link is wrong).
> Does that mean its not legal to use proprietary awt-apps with kaffe?
> 
> GCJ´s classpath stands under a special GPL license which allows 
> commercial companies to link against libgcj withought making their code 
> gpl, but its not allowed to modify the libgcj-code and sell it withought 
> GPLing the result (like this is possible with LPGL).
> It would be really important for me that my ported version stands under 
> the same license as GCJ´s classpath or LGPL.
> Who is the owner of this code?
> 
> lg Clemens
> 
> 
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