RE: Tasks for GPL-ed tools (Was: Re: Problems with licenses (GPL, LGPL)and task writing)

[Christoph Wilhelms <Ch...@t-online.de>]

Hi!

Generally I see Ant tasks under Apache Software License submitted to ant_dev
and built in our optional.jar. In your special case IMHO it demends to which
side the task belongs more: If you want to ship it with your tool perhaps
you should GPL it, if you want the task to be shipped with Ant you should
use ASF License and submit it here. For the other issues (reflection etc.) I
refer to what Peter told you - or go ask someone who knows GPL better then
we do ;-).

Greetinx,
Chris


> On 17 Jun 2001 10:50:50 +1000, Peter Donald wrote:
> >
> > [...] I am not a lawyer [...]
>
> Going back to the original question: "I wrote an Ant task for a GPL-ed
> tool.  Does that force my task to be GPL-ed too?  Can it be included in
> Ant?"
>
> These points seem to be clear:
>
> 1. GPL-ed code can't go into Ant CVS (or any other Apache projects).
>
> 2. If the task uses the GPL-ed tool through a command line interface,
> the the task would not be forced to be GPL-ed.
>
> 3. If the task calls into the GPL-ed tool through a programming
> interface, then the task would be forced to be GPL-ed.
>
> What about using reflection (assuming the GPL-ed tool is a Java tool)?
>
> --
> Weiqi Gao
> weiqigao@networkusa.net
>