Re: [Cobertura-devel] Licensing

[Benson M. <bim...@gm...>]

Piotr,

I see your dilemma. You don't have all the copyright holders at hand,
so you're stuck with the license as it is.

I do have a bit of an idea for you.

Let's distinguish the license from the interpretation of the license.

Ignoring (for the moment) the confusing AL-for-ant business, what you
have is code under the GPL. However, most of the text on your
licensing page is an \interpretation/ of the GPL. In my view, you
could remove all of that and replace it with, more or less, "the
source code of Cobertura is licensed under the GPL version 2.0".

Really, nothing about the GPL forces you to publish that stuff about
exec-ing additional jvms. There are people out there who think that
the GPL can be enforced to impose restrictions like that, and other
people who don't. I don't think you'd be at any risk of misleading
anyone if you got rid of it.

Of course, you can leave the AL grant on the page as well, but I
wonder if you have documentation that all of the copyright holders
approved it? The issue being that since that grant isn't written in
terms of specific source files, it seems to either apply to all of the
code or none of the code. If it applies to all of the code, that there
are those who would say that the copyright holders granted an AL 1.1
licence to the whole thing if they granted anything at all.

I could write more about the legal issues at work here, but I hate to
waste your time.

In purely practical terms, it appears that the Codehaus people have
decided that they are willing to operate by more or less ignoring the
interpretative verbiage and just looking at the GPL and how maven
works. So we can keep the plugin in Codehaus and stop being all
tangled up with the 'ant' aspect of things.

--benson