[jdom-interest] Imcompatibility with GPL

Jason Hunter jhunter at servlets.com
Sun Oct 1 19:58:13 PDT 2006


Elliotte Harold wrote:
> Jason Hunter wrote:
> 
>> Thanks for the link.  In *my* opinion, his opinion isn't in any 
>> fashion authoritative on the question.  In fact, because he's a lawyer 
>> for the FSF he has more bias on the issue than I'd myself want if I 
>> was looking for legal advice on the topic.
> 
> Read it again. The *only* reason anyone ever thought there was a problem 
> is because they misinterpreted something he said in the first place.

I recall this concern was present long before July 2003!  When I worked 
at CollabNet (circa 2000) one of my jobs was working with companies as 
they open sourced their code.  In that time (years before the Slashdot 
story) the issue of how to interpret the LGPL in the context of Java was 
a significant issue for the companies and their legal teams.

If there's been a true resolution of the issue I'm unaware of it.

An FSF lawyer posting that organization's postion is nice but doesn't 
resolve the issue.  Based on my understanding of how the legal system 
works, the lawyer who writes a license doesn't have special rights to 
interpret the license text.

(Although an organization's statement concerning the license for their 
own intellectual property may be used as evidence in a lawsuit.)

-jh-


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