Re: Fwd: GPL

>Here's part of an email exchange with someone choosing between Nice and
>Scala
>  
>
Thanks for forwarding it. Please make the answers known to that person 
(maybe he could subscribe to nice-info since he's considering using Nice).

>>- The GPL license on the runtime files really make me nervous about
>>using in a commercial product that I'm working on.  I saw Daniels
>>message about the runtime files being LGPL, but I don't think that's
>>what it says in the source.  
>>
The runtime files written by us (in the nice.lang package) are now under 
the GPL + linking exception. This is even more permissive than the LPGL, 
because it allows distribution under any license, even if you do static 
linking.
(If a file that ends up in the runtime does not have that license, 
please point it out to me)

>>Also, the runtime files under the gnu
>>(also GPL according to the source) package are written by someone
>>else, so I would have to contact that person to verify that it would
>>be ok to distribute in a non-GPL program.  
>>
For the gnu.* files, you can find the license here:
http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/License.html#License
In particular, the license says:

These classes are free software.  You can use and re-distribute a class
without restriction (in source or binary form) as long as you use a
version that has not been modified in any way from a version released
by Per Bothner, Red Hat inc, or the Free Software Foundation.


Most of the gnu.* classes in the runtime of Nice programs are indeed 
unmodified. 2 or 3 have some code commented out to cut their 
dependencies to other classes, so there is a question here. I'll check 
with Per, but I'm sure we can find a solution for them too (either 
technical or legal).

In the worst case, we could reimplement those classes, they are mostly 
trivial. I am completely dedicated to let Nice users choose what license 
they apply on their own code.

>>Also, NiceSwing appears
>>to be GPL as well, so to do any GUI development I would need to
>>rewrite it.  
>>
Yes, I just noticed this recently. This is an oversight, probably a 
copy-paste from the compiler source. I mentioned this to Martin 
Gamsjaeger, who is the main author (although he did not claim the 
copyright in the headers). He could not fix that straight away because 
he was on holidays, only connecting from a cyber cafe, but his answer was:

"For the license matter, feel free to change the license of niceswing to the one that best fits the users need."


So there is no problem about nice-swing. Expect a version under GPL + 
linking exception soon.

Daniel



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