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

["Ralph Goers (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-45?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12747631#action_12747631 ] 

Ralph Goers commented on LEGAL-45:
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I wrote an Apache Commons VFS "Provider" for SVNKit. Due to SVNKit's licensing, I have not added the provider to VFS (or made it open source at all for that matter). However,  discussions on legal-discuss lead me to believe that including the provider in VFS would be OK because:
a) it is optional - SVNKit would be listed as an optional dependency in the pom.xml and VFS would not include support for the provider unless the SVNKit jar is present.
b) SVNKit would not be distributed by the ASF. The user would have to specifically add the dependency to their pom.xml to build their application or add it to the appropriate classpath directory.

SVNKit's license is at http://svnkit.com/license.html


> 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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