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From: Robert Z. <ro...@sc...> - 2004-04-13 18:42:52
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I am curious as to everyone's thoughts and opinions about possibly changing our license from GPL to the Apache license, version 2.0. The reason for this change... Gnu has declared that ASF 2.0 and the GPL are incompatible licenses. This means that an application containing GPL'ed code cannot be distributed with ASF code. Our current incarnation of eledge doesn't really use apache code (the cvs version uses commons-fileupload, but I don't believe release 3.1 does), but if we do head down the path to using tapestry, the, apache code will be integrated quite a bit into our application. The apache organization has said that they are in contact with the Gnu organization, and both Gnu and apache may release updated versions of their licenses at some point in the future to make them compatible. In the meanwhile, do we wish to change our license? The license incompatibility does /not/ prevent us from using apache and gpl'ed code. What it /does/ do is prevent us from distributing the code together. This means that we would be requiring our users to not only get tomcat/mysql if they don't have them already (acceptable, as we do not wish to lock our users into any particular servlet runner. For that matter, after using cayenne for the db abstraction, we will no longer be locking our users into mysql, either), but also the tapestry framework, and any other libraries we/they might need (cayenne). At some point, the amount of work to get a project built/working overcomes the payoff to do so. That is to say, it would be nice if we could distribute a source package, but also distribute a prebuilt WAR that can be dropped into any servlet 2.3 spec compliant servlet runner and have our users hit the ground running. Please let me know your thoughts on this matter. (Especially Dr. Wight, as this is your creation and you initially chose the GPL license; if you wish to continue releasing it under that license, we will do so). Robert |