On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 9:03 AM, John D. Ament <johndam...@apache.org> wrote:
> > The info I provided was based on a discussion on legal, originally carried > over from a discussion on optional dependencies on software licensed under > the Amazon Software License - > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/2630f3d9540f02ef24f5e03cc171c4 > a2975bd8965c80a1965a55c0b4@%3Clegal-discuss.apache.org%3E > > Yet another long thread on the same topic. I was on Legal for ~5 years and Hibernate came up again and again. Since their is an JPA implementation in-house, there would be no need to depend on Hibernate for Apache projects. And perhaps it is unfair to talk about Hibernate if you want to discuss Amazon licensing terms, but that is where this thread headed (until I stopped reading about half way down). People (myself included at times) forget that our own individual 'opinion' and 'interpretation' are irrelevant. What matters are "legal opinion" from a lawyer, who is guessing(!) what a court/judge would rule, and to a lesser degree the "intent of the license author", who in (L)GPL case is FSF Legal Counsel (Eben Mogel just stepped down, btw), lawyers spending years to figure this out, and when FSF declare an intent we either follow that or take it to court. Then to make matters worse, the software project author sometimes expresses an intent that differs from the intent of its license author, and the "exceptions" comes to play (or not). Cheers -- Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer http://polygene.apache.org - New Energy for Java
