[jsword-devel] Presentation and license question

[Joe Walker]

Hi,

I think a handy question to ask is "who could sue us for what we are
doing?". I'm not suggesting that legal rescourse is a good idea, but
that the question can help sort issues out.

In our case since we own the GPL code, then I think we would have to
sue ourselves over this issue. I guess we could concieve of a
situation where someone that contributed without knowning we used
lucene later got cross, but that sounds even less likely than the
issue you linked-to ever being resolved in court, which is in itself
far less likely than the GPL itself being tested in court, which I'm
not sure has happened properly even now?

That said we ought to have a correct resolution to this issue, which I
think is to have a readme file somewhere that says "You are allowed to
link to these jar files whatever the GPL says". I thought I'd done
this once already, but I can't see it now. This action is one that the
FSF recommend anyway due to some other linking issue.

It is also worth remembering that virtually every time licenses come
up on jsword we start getting het up about the issues. So lets
remember not to repeat previous discussions.

Joe.


On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:49:05 +0100, Sergio Queiroz <srmq at srmq.org> wrote:
> Hello everybody!
> 
> I have just entered this list, I'm starting to know the SWORD project
> and its siblings, like gnomesword and jsword. Congratulations for the
> fantastic work!
> 
> I hope I can contribute somehow to this project in the near future. I'm
> a PhD student at the Paris VI University in France. Java is one of my
> favorite languages, so I have a special interest in a project like
> jsword.
> 
> I've been browsing jsword site and have noticed that while jsword is
> released under the GPL, it apparently uses jakarta Lucene, which is
> released under the Apache License v2.0. My question is, being the Apache
> License v2.0 and the GPL mutually incompatible (that is, we cannot
> combine modules under these two licenses into a larger program), isn't
> this a major problem for jsword? Could it really be released under the
> GPL?
> 
> For more information about the incompatibility between Apache License
> v2.0 and the GPL, see http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-
> compatibility.html
> 
> In Christ,
> 
> Sergio.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> jsword-devel mailing list
> jsword-devel at crosswire.org
> http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/jsword-devel
>