[kaffe] Relicensing the Verifier, and Turning it On

[rob at kaffe.org]

Hi all,

[The first part of this email is about licensing stuff, the last bit is
more interesting ;)]

There are a couple parties interested in using bits of Kaffe's verifier,
but the GPL is not compatible with their projects' licenses.  In the past,
I released an older version (of pass 3) for Chris Gray's WankaVM under the
MIT license, because I had done all of the development and so had the
copyright.  I would like to do a similar thing with the current
development snapshot, and would certainly like to release it under
multiple licenses when I'm pretty content that it's production-ready.

I believe that Helmer, Guilhem, and Dalibor have all done various things
to the verifier's code since my last relicensing, which means, I believe,
that I need their permission this time around.  I went through the
ChangeLogs and didn't find anyone else mentioned, but I wanted to make
sure on this list, as it's possible that I missed a small contribution
(the ChangeLogs are mighty long these days).

Anyway, I don't want to pressure anyone into doing anything contrary to
their convictions.  If you have contributed, and you feel strongly about
the GPL and so don't want to give permission to relicense, then I'm
content to continue working on Kaffe's verifier and not relicense it.
However, I think it ultimately benefits more people if I have the ability
to give what is mostly my work to whomever will find it useful.


In other news, Helmer created a patch that seems to fix the Circular
Linking Bug in the class loader I reported earlier (Thanks!).  I've been
really busy and haven't had much time to play with it, but when the
patched kaffe is run with -verifyremote as an option I am able to run lots
of big programs.  As soon as things like Eclipse, Ant, etc., work with
-verifyremote (just a couple small bugs to iron out, nothing really major
has been popping up), I suggest that we turn verification on by default in
the CVS head.  Objections?

Also, I was wondering how close we are to officially releasing 1.1.5, and
thus how much time I have to debug so that, potentially, 1.1.5 would have
verification on be default.  I'm happy to wait for 1.1.6 to do that; I
mostly just wanted people's opinions.


cheers,
Rob