Brett, OK, I follow. I wanted to just add the two cents that, since this is a tool and not a library, the complex licensing is very unlikely to cause anyone any practical problems.
Ironically, your analysis of the history of the thing indicates that the cobertura team cannot really grant the license that they profess to grant to the ant part in the first place, unless they accept Larry's attitude toward derived works. They are claiming that their own ant code is an independent work that just depends on the existing GPL code, and so it can have an independent license. This contradicts their own 'fork a jvm' verbiage. If they don't accept Larry's view, then their ant thing is a derived work, and they can't license it AL at all. --benson On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 1:17 AM, Brett Porter <br...@apache.org> wrote: > > On 02/04/2011, at 7:08 AM, Benson Margulies wrote: > >> Brett will have to write for himself. From my point of view, either a >> proper Codehaus / Apache notice (one that claims copyright for >> Codehaus and then grants the license) or a BSD license would be fine. >> However, Brett likely knows something that I don't. >> >> In both cases, my view is, following Larry Rosen, nothing in the GPL >> actually inhibits something like c-m-p from calling something like >> cobertura. > > This is what my understanding is: > - Cobertura must license under GPL, because they inherited much of the code > from the defunct GPL jcoverage project. New pieces were Apache Licensed, but > the whole is GPL. > - We can license the plugin code however we want (currently ALv2). Due to the > way it uses Cobertura, the whole plugin can not be under the terms of the > just the AL - users would need to adhere to the terms of both (in the same > way as Cobertura itself) > - ALv2 is not compatible with GPLv2 due to the patent terms, making that > situation a bit weird. BSD would make that simpler, but I'm not sure it > actually matters. > - Regardless, the headers should be fixed (there's a few instances in Mojo > where this needs to happen) > - I can't find the email, but I'm quite sure Ben or Bob ok'd Maven plugins > that depend on GPL from a policy PoV. We could ask again if there's any > concerns. > > I don't think there's any reason to limit continuing the work on these. > > - Brett > > -- > Brett Porter > br...@apache.org > http://brettporter.wordpress.com/ > http://au.linkedin.com/in/brettporter > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from this list, please visit: > > http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, please visit: http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
