Re: [Ikvm-developers] When is it not legal to convert a JAR library to a DLL file?

[Jeroen F. <je...@su...>]

Hi,

I don't think anyone except your lawyer can give legal advice, but I think that most people assume that as long as you don't distribute and are licensed to use the original file, recompilation should be allowed.

Regards,
Jeroen

From: Richard Callahan [mailto:ri...@lu...]
Sent: Tuesday, November 3, 2015 15:30
To: ikv...@li...
Subject: [Ikvm-developers] When is it not legal to convert a JAR library to a DLL file?

Hi,

My third question (of three) today is a legal question. In searching for an answer to my other two questions, I came across this old post<http://sourceforge.net/p/ikvm/mailman/message/4229326/> to the forum in which it appeared that in some cases it may not be legal to convert a JAR file in the Sun JDK to a DLL file. I'm working with a large number of JAR files associated with various platforms, and I assume that some such as JBoss are proprietary. There are two parts to my question:


1)      I have permission to convert some JAR file A.JAR to A.DLL and then use the resulting DLL file. If I convert some other JAR file B.JAR to B.DLL file solely for the purposes of referencing it when converting A.JAR to A.DLL, is there ever a situation where that's going to be considered illegal on the grounds that I'm somehow modifying and repurposing proprietary software (or, I suppose, for any other reason)? That sure seems like a stretch to me, but I'm still pretty green so I thought I should ask. That forum post from 2004 was asking about distributing the DLL file after its conversion, so my working assumption is that I'm in the clear.

2)      Now let's say that instead of deleting B.DLL immediately after running a batch file containing calls to IKVMC, I cache the file and use it later for the same purpose: referencing B.DLL when converting some other file C.JAR to C.DLL. Legally, have I done anything differently than I did in part 1?

If the answer to either of these is "it depends on what the owner of the JAR file thinks," what a nightmare that would be if you have hundreds of these things. Well, that's all I've got. Thanks very much!

Best,

Richard