Re: [Cobertura-devel] Fwd: Licensing

[John W. L. <Joh...@sa...>]

I am certainly not an expert on licensing, but I am generally happy to work with the maven plugin developers if they would like to see the web page on licensing changed.   There has never been an attempt to "require the use of ant" and the web page should not convey that.   By the way, I do not see the phrase "use of ant" on the page.   Are we talking about this one:  http://cobertura.sourceforge.net/license.html?

Anyway, the way I see it is that the web page is generally for information only.   The only thing of legal importance is the license that is in the code, but I could be wrong.   It is true that the packages with ant in their name have source files that have the Apache license.  All other packages have GPL'ed code.

Generally, the history as I know it is this.   Cobertura was forked by Mark Doliner who got a copy of the public version of JCoverage.   Most of the code was GPL'ed except for the code related to the ant tasks.   That code had to be Apache licensed since it was to run in Ant.     Since Apache and the GPL are not compatible, it appears the JCoverage team attempted to get around that by having the ant tasks exec another process to execute the GPL'ed code.   It sounds to me that Benson's opinion is that the JCoverage team could have GPL'ed all the code, and that there is nothing in the Apache license that prohibits an ant task to be GPL'ed.   I don't know the answer.

Mark made a request to JCoverage to change their license, but they were unwilling to change it.   So, we are stuck with the GPL.  They are the only ones that would come after Maven developers for copyright infringement.   It would certainly not be Cobertura developers.

The content of the current web page was written by Mark.   I can ask Mark to be sure, but I think the intention of that page was to reassure users of Cobertura that their use of Cobertura was not going to put them at risk of having to GPL their own code.   I think the idea is that people are more comfortable with the Apache license, but there was no intent to force them to use Apache or Ant.

I am happy to hear that the maven plugin development goes on.   I recently have not had any luck trying to subscribe to the mailing lists.  I was attempting to subscribe to them due to Cobertura users mentioning having similar problems.   I was trying to use this page:  http://mojo.codehaus.org/cobertura-maven-plugin/mail-lists.html.  Please let me know if that was wrong.

John


From: Piotr Tabor [mailto:pi...@ta...]
Sent: Friday, April 15, 2011 5:49 AM
To: cob...@li...; Benson Margulies
Subject: [Cobertura-devel] Fwd: Licensing

I'm sorry - I've responded directly to Benson, and it couldn't help in getting a comment from John.

Piotr
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Piotr Tabor <pi...@ta...<mailto:pi...@ta...>>
Date: Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 7:54 PM
Subject: Re: [Cobertura-devel] Licensing
To: Benson Margulies <bim...@gm...<mailto:bim...@gm...>>



On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 7:18 PM, Benson Margulies <bim...@gm...<mailto:bim...@gm...>> wrote:
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.

+1 from me.

Let's make License page that says only:

The Cobertura ant tasks (list of packages) are licensed under the Apache Software License, Version 1.1.
The rest of Cobertura is licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.0. See below for detailed explanations.

We can move the rest to License FAQ with a comment that important is a License and here are only hints how to be 99% safe.

What do you think John ?


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 thought about granting "only code that I have written from a scratch" to a
new project. But I would need other people that want to work on the project.
I don't have enough time to do it myself, and I don't think that bigger fragmentation
is a good idea.

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.

Thanks for pointing this out.

Piotr




--
Pozdrawiam,
Piotr Tabor