[jira] [Commented] (CLEREZZA-944) Virtuoso JDBC legal aspect

["Minto van der Sluis (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CLEREZZA-944?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=14092145#comment-14092145 ] 

Minto van der Sluis commented on CLEREZZA-944:
----------------------------------------------

I have had contact with Openlink on this. Below in except from this email correspondence:

> Apache Clerezza contains an abstraction layer to access various
> triple/quad stores. Recently some of us (I am a committer) have been
> working on supporting Virtuoso. We now have this working and we are
> wondering about the licensing of the Virtuoso JDBC driver in conjunction
> with the Apache license. Especially if we can ship the JDBC driver as
> part of the application.

Virtuoso Open Source is licensed under the GPL 2 license which is as you may know incompatible with the Apache License v2 as explained in:

	http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html

However to avoid this kind of mess when using an ODBC/JDBC client driver in an application that is written under a different license or even closed source, the VOS license holds the following exemption:

	Client Protocol Driver exemptions
	---------------------------------

    	In addition, as a special exemption, OpenLink Software gives
    	permission to use the unmodified client libraries (ODBC, JDBC,
    	ADO.NET, OleDB, Jena, Sesame and Redland providers) in your own
    	application whether open-source or not, with no obligation to use
    	the GPL on the resulting application. In all other respects you 
    	must abide by the terms of the GPL.


It is our opinion that loading a data-access driver at runtime, should not fall under the 'linking' terms of the GPL license, as detailed in:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception


We preferred this approach over using different licenses for the data-access drivers like LGPL or BSD.




> Virtuoso JDBC legal aspect
> --------------------------
>
>                 Key: CLEREZZA-944
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CLEREZZA-944
>             Project: Clerezza
>          Issue Type: Bug
>            Reporter: Reto Gmür
>            Priority: Critical
>
> The issue is discussed in LEGAL-173.
> Despite that issue not being closed so far we have by now releases org.apache.clerezza:ext.virtuoso.jdbc which includes the jar under the GPL2 with special exception license. 
> Th special clause allows "to use the unmodified client libraries" in non GPL software. However it also says that "In all other respects you must abide by the terms of the GPL", I think this means at least that the notice file should provide the note that there is no warranty.
> Also if the virtjdbc license qualifies as category B the following applies:
> "Although the source must not be included in Apache products, the NOTICE file, which is required to be included in each ASF distribution, must point to the source form of the included binary (more on that in the forthcoming "Receiving and Releasing Contributions" document)." (from http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html)



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