icedtea licensing

[Colin Watson]

So, I've been working my way through the icedtea source package
debian/copyright file as uploaded by Matthias (trusting that it is a
faithful description of the licensing of IcedTea). The main problem I
see is that OpenJDK is licensed under the GPL v2 with additional terms
which permit exceptions for certain third-party components with
incompatible licences (the obvious ones I see are the Apache Software
License versions 1.1 and 2.0, the Netscape Public License version 1.1,
and the XFree86 License version 1.1); but IcedTea and the Java Access
Bridge are not.

I'm not entirely clear on the relationship between these components, and
it seems to me that whether the whole is distributable depends on that.
IcedTea is clearly a derivative work of OpenJDK, so it seems to me that
the copyright holders of IcedTea need to offer similar GPL exceptions to
OpenJDK. How about the Java Access Bridge? Is it just a well-separated
extra component basically bolted on to the side? If so, its licensing
doesn't matter, but I wasn't sure.


Of course, it's likely that the IcedTea developers intended their work
to be distributable, that being kind of the point of IcedTea. :-) As I
understand it, IcedTea is derived from Classpath, whose licence says:

  As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you
  permission to link this library with independent modules to produce an
  executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent
  modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under
  terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked
  independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that
  module.  An independent module is a module which is not derived from
  or based on this library.  If you modify this library, you may extend
  this exception to your version of the library, but you are not
  obligated to do so.  If you do not wish to do so, delete this
  exception statement from your version.

... so if IcedTea meets the same terms then all that would be needed
would be a statement in debian/copyright to say so, and for upstream to
clarify this in their distribution at some point. Is it your belief that
this is the case? If so, all we need is to clarify this somewhere, and
if this is in progress then I'll be happy to accept icedtea as is.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]