[jdom-interest] XOM

[Dennis Sosnoski]

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:

>
> Keep in mind that the primary navigation is meant to take place 
> through the element itself. i.e. XOM deliberately eschews the JDOM 
> style of asking the Element to give you a list of children which you 
> then iterate through. Instead the primary XOM style is asking the 
> element itself for its first child node, second child node, etc. If 
> this is how you're accessing the data, there should be no need to 
> create a new list after each mutation.

Yes, I realize this - that's one of the reasons I feel XOM is closer to 
DOM than to JDOM.

>>  The LGPL license also bothers me, since it's considerably more 
>> restrictive than the Apache-style licensing used by JDOM and dom4j. 
>> Do you care to comment on why you chose LGPL?
>
>
> Because the LGPL better protects your freedom and mine. I see no use 
> cases that matter to me where anyone should be significantly hindered 
> by the LGPL. (Selling a proprietary, closed source product base don my 
> work without paying me for it is not a use case that matters to me, 
> funnily enough.) If somebody does present such a use case, I can 
> always dual license or donate the code under a different license.

This enters into a branch of politics where words seem to lose their 
usual meanings. To me the Apache license is "more free" than LGPL/GPL, 
because it puts less restrictions on me as a developer. :-)

It's not exactly clear what the legal implications of the LGPL are when 
used for Java libraries; for instance, suppose someone wants to subclass 
XOM classes to build a virtual document model that doesn't need to be 
completely memory-resident. Would the subclasses need to be LGPL as 
well? I'd suspect yes, but I don't think there are any legal guidelines 
in this area.

You certainly have the right to use any license you choose. However, 
that choice may restrict the usability of the library for some 
applications. I suspect the vast majority of the XML work being done 
these days is for commercial applications, and for many of these LGPL is 
likely to be a problem.

  - Dennis