Re: When is it not legal to convert a JAR library to a DLL file?

I’m no lawyer, so I have no hesitation in straying into territory where lawyers fear to tread.

Oracle’s license at

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/index.html <http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/index.html>

basically allows you to do very little. For example in section 1:

The use of Software in systems and solutions that provide dedicated functionality …  are excluded from this definition and not licensed under this Agreement.

(Yes, they can’t even get the grammar right.) They give some examples of what they mean (e.g. use in mobile phones), but examples are not a definition, and what the license actually says is that you can’t use Java in special-purpose software. What that means in practice is that if you’re Google they will sue you, and if you aren’t, then they probably won’t.

More pertinently, clause 2 says that you can "reproduce and use internally the Software complete and unmodified for the sole purpose of running Programs”. Now, as technical people we know that you can’t run programs without modifying the software, e.g. JIT compilation, so we need to interpret “modified” to mean “modified only to the extent necessary for running the program” which we could intepret as allowing translation into a different target language. But whether you could convince a court that this was the correct interpretation would depend on how good a lawyer you can afford.

Your best defense is not to stick your head above the parapet, and not to get so big that it’s worth their while suing you. Either that, or get so big that you can afford to fight your case, and not care if you lose.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

>  
> From: Richard Callahan [mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>] 
> Sent: Tuesday, November 3, 2015 15:30
> To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
> Subject: [Ikvm-developers] When is it not legal to convert a JAR library to a DLL file?
>  
> Hi,
>  
> My third question (of three) today is a legal question. In searching for an answer to my other two questions, I came across this old post <http://sourceforge.net/p/ikvm/mailman/message/4229326/> to the forum in which it appeared that in some cases it may not be legal to convert a JAR file in the Sun JDK to a DLL file. I’m working with a large number of JAR files associated with various platforms, and I assume that some such as JBoss are proprietary. There are two parts to my question:
>  
> 1)      I have permission to convert some JAR file A.JAR to A.DLL and then use the resulting DLL file. If I convert some other JAR file B.JAR to B.DLL file solely for the purposes of referencing it when converting A.JAR to A.DLL, is there ever a situation where that’s going to be considered illegal on the grounds that I’m somehow modifying and repurposing proprietary software (or, I suppose, for any other reason)? That sure seems like a stretch to me, but I’m still pretty green so I thought I should ask. That forum post from 2004 was asking about distributing the DLL file after its conversion, so my working assumption is that I’m in the clear.
> 2)      Now let’s say that instead of deleting B.DLL immediately after running a batch file containing calls to IKVMC, I cache the file and use it later for the same purpose: referencing B.DLL when converting some other file C.JAR to C.DLL. Legally, have I done anything differently than I did in part 1?
>  
> If the answer to either of these is “it depends on what the owner of the JAR file thinks,” what a nightmare that would be if you have hundreds of these things. Well, that’s all I’ve got. Thanks very much!
>  
> Best,
>  
> Richard
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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