Hi, (CCed debian-legal, so they know where we are, what we are working on and where we might need some help in the future)
On Wed, 2005-01-12 at 01:10 -0500, Grzegorz B. Prokopski wrote: > On Wed, 2005-12-01 at 02:49 +0000, Dalibor Topic wrote: > > However if nobody stands up and say clearly, that there IS a problem, > that GPL and CPL/APL are NOT compatible, and cannot be linked together, > then we'll still see plenty people WASTING THEIR TIME on things that > cannot legally benefit Debian Project and Debian users. > > Your POV, as Kaffe developer, not Debian, might be of course different, > but I do not mean to bring up discussion whether Kaffe's "official" > standing on the understanding GPL is right or not. > > > I find it tiresome to rehash the same disagreement about interpeting the GPL > > over and over again each time there is a new SableVM release to promote. Could you please try and stop beating each other up on the "my runtime is bigger than your runtime" thing? And please stop suggesting the FSF, Debian, GNU Classpath or Kaffe hackers don't think the GPL/CPL/APL incompatibility are serious problems that need a real solution. But I guess we have not always been clear that we are looking for real solutions. Unfortunately these legal/social/political hacks are far from easy and the process is slow. Apache has started to use Gump to build and run all their code base written in the java programming language using kaffe. We are only at 20% at the moment (see http://brutus.apache.org/gump/kaffe/), but we are making nice progress almost daily. Everybody is well aware that for this mission to succeed we need to come to a solution on better integration of ASL and (L)GPL code bases. I want to thank some of the Apache gump hackers involved for starting talks between the FSF, ASF, Kaffe, GNU Classpath and GCC/GCJ people about what the problem areas are between the groups. All hackers involved are really upbeat about going forward and solving some key issues. At the same time we all realize that there are some fundamental philosophical issues, customs and interpretations between the groups. Everyone is well aware that the last time the ASL/GPL issue came up some miscommunication took place and mistakes were made. We really want to prevent that this time around. But it takes time to build up trust. (See also http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html) But while nobody can promise yet that things will work out as we hope I want to stress that nobody is wasting their time helping with building, testing and packaging free programs and libraries written in the java programming language like eclipse and the apache jakarta packages using gcj, kaffe or any other free runtime packaged for Debian. The Fedora eclipse packagers (who us gcj) are well aware of the Debian efforts (using kaffe) and do learn from each other about the different build issues with eclipse. The bugs found by the kaffe-gump effort have made it into GNU Classpath which is the core class library of almost all free execution environments (including gcj, kaffe, kissme, sablevm, jamvm, ikvm.net and jikesRVM). Packaging issues for traditional java based libraries and programs are often interesting challenges since they don't immediately fit into the packaging requirements of modern GNU/Linux systems like Debian. So it takes some experimentation to get it right. I hope the JPackage effort (http://www.jpackage.org/) largly adopted by the Fedora hackers for their gcj based system can help. See also http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-November/msg00373.html A similar cooperation between CPL/GPL code base hackers would be very welcome. There were some talks on solving the incompatibilities between the GPL and CPL but those stranded (not enough time) when the Eclipse group got their own foundation and new board of directors. Working on this issue from the top (board level) is sometimes surprisingly difficult. But as the Kaffe/Apache Gump example shows hackers who just want to get some work done can often help a lot getting different groups talking about real solutions again. Cheers, Mark
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