[jira] Commented: (LEGAL-45) optional dependency on svnkit

["Henri Yandell (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-45?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12792823#action_12792823 ] 

Henri Yandell commented on LEGAL-45:
------------------------------------

Less convinced. I think it's a stretch of the intent of the GPL for a VFS provider to be built against SVNKit, have the GPL parts removed and then distributed. I think the intent would be for the VFS SVNKit provider to be GPL as well and so the whole provider should be shipped from outside the ASF.

> optional dependency on svnkit
> -----------------------------
>
>                 Key: LEGAL-45
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-45
>             Project: Legal Discuss
>          Issue Type: Question
>            Reporter: Brett Porter
>
> SVNKit is under a license that is somewhat similar to the GPL (it is almost identical to the sleepycat license): http://svnkit.com/license.html
> It is unclear from the legal documentation on the status of *optional* modules. 
> Maven has developed an abstraction layer for various SCM systems, generally by running their CLI tools. We would like to offer a provider that uses svnkit as an optional alternative to the svn command line tools:
> http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/maven/scm/trunk/maven-scm-providers/maven-scm-providers-svn/maven-scm-provider-svnjava/
> The license of SVNKit doesn't affect our ability to distribute the provider under the Apache License, but anyone distributing the SVNKit binary must also distribute their code under an open source license.
> If we did this, we would keep the following:
> - it will not be made the default provider for SVN, that will remain the svn.exe based version.
> - it will be an optional part of the build from source (through a Maven profile), and will not be dependend on by other parts of the code
> - instructions on the site about how to use the svnkit provider would spell out that it requires the external dependency and that it is under a more restrictive license
> - we don't bundle and distribute svnkit as part of our releases
> Note that there is a reasonable alternate home, but it would be a shame to move the code out of Maven's oversight for this purpose alone.
> The discussion thread is here: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/maven-scm-dev/200903.mbox/%3c9948cb690903181722s2431ec04nc6ea48e3cc2d1bc7@mail.gmail.com%3e
> Is this an acceptable use case?

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