If I give you a CD with Eclipse and Kaffe on it, I have given you a whole work which will edit programs. You may not even know what Kaffe is, but if you don't have it, Eclipse is not going to run. That sure sounds like it makes up part of the whole which is an IDE. This relationship is well expressed by Debian dependencies.
Under your intepretation all of debian must be GPLd as none of it will run without the GPLd kernel. That makes GPL violate DFSG and non-free. What a fascinating mess.
Now, it is true that Eclipse will run with other JVMs. But if they are not on the CD, then it doesn't matter. The GPL cares about what it is distributed with, not about stuff it could be distributed with. And the only thing allowed on the CD is stuff in main, because this whole argument is over whether Eclipse can go into main. Not whether Eclipse is distributable at all.
The other VMs are on that CD, because they are in main already.
> There are a few ways to fix this whole issue
1) The Kaffe hackers get the library exemption added to _all_ of Kaffe.
Not even the FSF has such an exception for their interpreters (Bash, Make, Less, ...) and that doesn't make their intepreters undistributable along with non-GPLd data in Debian. Why should Kaffe need such an exception for all of it?
2) The gcj or sablevm hackers get Eclipse working.
I too, would prefer to see sableVM hackers get their VM fixed instead of raising fear, uncertainity and doubt about the legal status of using and distributing Kaffe.
cheers, dalibor topic
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