Re: Three weeks left until feature freeze

* Joshua D. Drake (jd@commandprompt.com) wrote:
> Keep in mind that that there are all kinds of oddities when mixing
> licenses. Is Sun's JVM GPL compatible? If not, the plJava can't use it.

I'm about 95% sure that Sun's JVM *isn't* GPL compatible...  Makes for a
pretty odd situation if someone licensed a Java app which only works
with Sun's JVM under the GPL.  The combination of the Java app with
Sun's JVM then becomes impossible to distribute.  This is more a problem
with the GPL's 'no additional restrictions' clause than anything else,
but, well, the GPL is pretty popular. :/

> It doesn't HAVE TO BE BUILT, it is not a derivative product.

Many distributions try to build all the parts of a given application
since otherwise someone will almost certainly ask for it.  Therefore,
I'm not really sure this is a great argument.

> It doesn't ship with the JVM which means it is up to the user to break
> the license not the PostgreSQL project...

It's not the PostgreSQL project's problem, that's true, but it certainly
becomes an issue for distributions.  Java as a PL ends up being a pretty
odd case..  If there isn't anything in the PL code itself which forces a
dependency beyond gcj then it might be possible to distribute it.  Also
allowing the PL to use a different JVM shouldn't be a problem so long as
nothing is distributed which depends on the alternate JVM.  The GPL is
all about distribution and so I'm not sure that it would actually be a
problem for an end-user to use Sun's JVM with GPL'd Java code.

Anyhow, if people are really interested in these issues as they relate
to a distribution, it might make sense to bring it up on debian-legal...
Thanks,
    Stephen