Wonka & Classpath

[Chris Gray]

Mark, etc.,

sorry you haven't heard from me for a few days - other things have been 
claiming my attention.

Yes, I agree that the the revised Classpath exception to the GPL removes one 
of the main barriers to the use of GPL'd software in embedded systems, namely 
that pretty well everything in such a system is "linked" with everything 
else, and therefore if one component falls under the GPL then the whole 
system must be distributed on GPL terms.

However it still seems to me that GPL+exception excludes the possibility of 
binary-only distributions, something which we do not wish to exclude. 
Admittedly there seems to be little reason why a systems integrator would 
need to make proprietary modifications to a core package such as java.awt (as 
opposed to wonka.rudolph.peers), but still I can imagine cases where the GPL 
would impose on the system integrator the obligation to provide source code 
to anyone who asked.  Perhaps Andy of Aicas can explain why this is not a 
problem for them?

In the meantime it remains my feeling that a project should ideally have one 
owner and one licence, and in the case of Wonka the owner is Acunia and the 
licence is (revised) BSD. I can consider making the whole available under a 
second licence as an alternative, but having parts with one owner and licence 
(Acunia, BSD) and parts with another owner and licence (FSF, GPL+exc.) 
doesn't make sense to me.

However, I still see a lot to be gained by agreeing on a common interface 
between the java.awt classes and their peers: there is almost no 
documentation available from the shining light at the centre of our universe, 
so currently we are just improvising.  If Classpath were to propose an 
interface then we would certainly be willing to review and eventually adopt 
it; in fact we could probably help with the preparation of the proposal. Then 
our framebuffer peers (and any other peers developed for Wonka) would be 
available for use in Classpath-based projects and vice versa.

(Note that currently we are also using a Wonka-specific interface for 
communication between the native and java parts of our peers. Replacing this 
with JNI has been on our to-do list for a long time, and it just got a goodly 
priority boost).

Best wishes

Chris Gray