[Legal] Why is this LGPL notice file in our SVN?

[Alex Karasulu <ak...@apache.org>]

I thought we used SUN Java comm interfaces for serial communication and that
the native libraries or Java API for RXTX are not redistributed or used by
the MINA we distribute.  Why then would we have it's LGPL license included
at our top level?

    https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/mina/trunk/LICENSE.rxtx.txt

Is this a mistake?

Alex

Re: [Legal] Why is this LGPL notice file in our SVN?

[Alex Karasulu <ak...@apache.org>]

Thanks again!
Alex

On Jan 19, 2008 11:21 AM, Emmanuel Lecharny <el...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Alex,
>
> I have forwarded this mail to the MINA ML.
>
> Alex Karasulu wrote:
> > I thought we used SUN Java comm interfaces for serial communication
> > and that the native libraries or Java API for RXTX are not
> > redistributed or used by the MINA we distribute.  Why then would we
> > have it's LGPL license included at our top level?
> >
> >     https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/mina/trunk/LICENSE.rxtx.txt
> >
> > Is this a mistake?
> >
> > Alex
> >
>
>
> --
> --
> cordialement, regards,
> Emmanuel Lécharny
> www.iktek.com
> directory.apache.org
>
>
>

Re: [Legal] Why is this LGPL notice file in our SVN?

[Emmanuel Lecharny <el...@gmail.com>]

Alex,

I have forwarded this mail to the MINA ML.

Alex Karasulu wrote:
> I thought we used SUN Java comm interfaces for serial communication 
> and that the native libraries or Java API for RXTX are not 
> redistributed or used by the MINA we distribute.  Why then would we 
> have it's LGPL license included at our top level?
>
>     https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/mina/trunk/LICENSE.rxtx.txt
>
> Is this a mistake?
>
> Alex
>


-- 
--
cordialement, regards,
Emmanuel Lécharny
www.iktek.com
directory.apache.org

Re: [Legal] Why is this LGPL notice file in our SVN?

[Emmanuel Lecharny <el...@gmail.com>]

Trustin Lee wrote:
> It's not a mistake.  I think we had enough discussion:
>
> http://markmail.org/message/zpjhpxlj3hul3phx#query:+page:1+mid:zpjhpxlj3hul3phx+state:results
>   
This discussion conclusions were pretty clear, I think :

"I think that the last sentence is pretty clear to me : either you write 
your own interface, or you accept compilation errors (up to the user to 
download the LGPL lib interface), but you should not include any part of 
this LGPL project into the repo.

Is that correct ?

Emmanuel"

"I believe so, yes. You absolutely cannot ship any LGPL code along with 
your releases. If users provide a version of that code themselves it's 
fine to have functionality that depends on it, although in general that 
sort of thing should be discouraged if possible.

-garrett"


So I think it's a mistake, IMHO.Someone misinterpreted the conclusion we 
reached in this thread.

> Please let me know if we need to add some notice statements in our distribution.
>   
http://people.apache.org/~cliffs/3party.html :


        "Category X: Excluded Licenses

The following licenses must *not* apply to any software within an Apache 
product, whether in source 
<http://people.apache.org/%7Ecliffs/3party.html#define-source> or binary 
<http://people.apache.org/%7Ecliffs/3party.html#define-binary> form""

In any case, I don't see why we have a Notice Statement in the 
distribution for a LGPL product. And we should also remove the reference 
to this library from the mina-transport-serial pom.xml.


> In
> contrast, RXTX is available in the official Maven repository and very
> stable and mature in what it's supposed to do.  What we need to do is
> to tell users that it is a LGPL'd library, and that's why
> LICENSE.rxtx.txt is there.
>   
There are two different things :
- you can tell users they can use a LGPL library, on there own behalf,
- but you can't distribute the code which does that.

We have had the very same problem at Directory with BDB : the conclusion 
is that if we want to distribute a BDB backend, then it has to be done 
out of the ASF.


Hope it helps, and that I'm not totally wrong...

PS : in any case, the best to clarify this situation, as the chairman, 
would be to push this question to legal@a.o. I don't know if it has been 
done last year, but I think it should have ...

-- 
--
cordialement, regards,
Emmanuel Lécharny
www.iktek.com
directory.apache.org

Re: [Legal] Why is this LGPL notice file in our SVN?

[Trustin Lee <tr...@gmail.com>]

It's not a mistake.  I think we had enough discussion:

http://markmail.org/message/zpjhpxlj3hul3phx#query:+page:1+mid:zpjhpxlj3hul3phx+state:results

Please let me know if we need to add some notice statements in our distribution.

Long story short, Sun made some backward incompatible changes in their
communications API, and the new version of the API didn't support
Linux (or Windows?) at all at that time and the situation lasted for a
long time.  RXTX also has forked from Java communications API due to
this reason.

I didn't keep track of the recent support of Sun's communication API,
let me know if you find something useful.  AFAIK, adding sun's
communication API into our direct dependency list, it bothers our
users to download it from the official web site manually.  In
contrast, RXTX is available in the official Maven repository and very
stable and mature in what it's supposed to do.  What we need to do is
to tell users that it is a LGPL'd library, and that's why
LICENSE.rxtx.txt is there.

Trustin

On Jan 20, 2008 1:07 AM, Alex Karasulu <ak...@apache.org> wrote:
> I thought we used SUN Java comm interfaces for serial communication and that
> the native libraries or Java API for RXTX are not redistributed or used by
> the MINA we distribute.  Why then would we have it's LGPL license included
> at our top level?
>
>     https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/mina/trunk/LICENSE.rxtx.txt
>
> Is this a mistake?
>
> Alex
>
>



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