icedtea licensing

[Tom Marble]

Colin Watson wrote:
> 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.

Please note that IcedTea as a project does not strictly include OpenJDK, but
rather some code (mainly delta patches) around it.

My interpretation of the Assembly Exception
  http://openjdk.java.net/legal/assembly-exception.html
And the related FAQ entries around
  http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/faq.jsp#g13
suggests that the AE may be carried forward in this context
as the license for the designated modules is not changing and the additional
code is under the GPL (thus not requiring any amendment to the AE).

> 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.

Java Access Bridge is an upstream from the Gnome Project available under
the LGPL v2. It ends up as a jar file which is included in jre/lib/ext/.

> 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:
>  [text of the Classpath Exception (CE) omitted]  
> ... 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.

In discussing this with some IcedTea developers it is indeed the intention
of the project to be redistributable and that a more explicit LICENSE
file (in IcedTea upstream) which has a succinct copyright block and
statements of carry forward of the CE and AE would be helpful.
I suspect that there may be a desire to give attribution to the
GNU/Classpath project as well where appropriate.

I have attached proposed changes to the copyright file (as copyright-tmarble1.gz)
which incorporate most of the changes doko proposed earlier.
My proposal includes:
- fixed upstream location for IcedTea to http://icedtea.classpath.org/
- added to the list of upstream authors (from IcedTea AUTHORS)
    Joshua Sumali <jsumali at redhat.com>
    Christian Thalinger <twisti at complang.tuwien.ac.at>
- added to the list of Java Access Bridge authors from the upstream
  AUTHORS and ChangeLog
- Changed the copyright blocks for IcedTea and Java Access Bridge to
  be "portions copyright" for each of the contributors
- removed "All Rights Reserved" for OpenJDK (this is in the class of "typos")
- Added a note that this packaging creates a combined work which
  carries forward the OpenJDK Assembly Exception.
- Fixed Java Access Bridge license (should be LGPL-2)
- converted use of "(C)" to "circle C".

As I am not the author of this packaging and resulting binaries I am only
offering these changes for your consideration.  IANAL and these comments
do not constitute legal advice.

Please let me know how I may be of further assistance,

--Tom

p.s. please keep me on CC: for followups
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: copyright-tmarble1.gz
Type: application/x-gzip
Size: 32545 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-archive/attachments/20071007/5e58e2f0/attachment-0001.bin