Re: [Cobertura-devel] Fwd: Licensing

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

Let's see. That's the right mailing list:

dev...@mo... should subscribe you. If it doesn't
work, you'll have to contact codehaus support.

That's the web page under discussion. I think some of the confusion
here about 'ant' was my attempt to guess how the page got to be the
way it is. Now that you folks have explained, I'm less confused.

Here's how I see things.

The bottom line is that I, and others at Codehaus, see no legal
difficulty with an ant task or a maven plugin, or anything else of the
kind, just calling the cobertura API -- any part of that API -- and
being licensed however the author wants to license it. Credible legal
experts have exploded the notion of classpath contamination. A Java
program that was compiled with the cobertura jar in the compiler's
clutches is not a derived work of the source of cobertura. So, we've
decided to go cheerfully ahead maintaining the maven plugin without
regard to the distinction between the ant tasks and the
not-the-ant-tasks. If the jcoverage people come after us with torches
and pitchforks, we'll have to deal with the results then. The worst
outcome is that they'd insist that the maven plugin become GPL, and
then it would have to move to github. Not the end of the world.

FWIW, The notion that ant and GPL are incompatible in the sense that
would effect a user of ant or maven is just plain wrong. Nothing about
the AL prevents someone from using a GPL ant task with ant, and
nothing about the GPL does, either. Emphasis here on *using*.

If someone created some body of code that incorporated both, more
complexity would ensue.

thanks,
benson