On Fri, 2003-07-18 at 03:01, Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:
in view of the positions recently taken by FSF with respect to LGPL and Java-based libraries, which has taken the view that clients of "included" Java libraries are virally attached by LGPL. As understood from skimming blogs discussing the issues, Apache foundation has opted to eschew LGPL libraries, in part, because of this FSF gloss.
Of course, this is largely political rather than legal. First, the FSF is bound to give the widest possible interpretation of their own (politically inspired) license; second, the ASF is not bound to go into a public fight with an entity that lots view as a sort of sibling organization.
Jar files are very similar to shared libraries, and when studying the LGPL in respect to Java development years ago, I concluded that binding .jar files would fall under clause 6. For Squeak, the situation is much muddier, because we currently have no way to get the 'anti-viral' protection offered by clause 6.
What I do wonder about: what's the fuzz? Clause 6 is *exactly* the clause that protects the 'host' program against the library w.r.t. virality, so this should be *good* news for the Java community (well, now news - lots of us already new this since, say, 1995). Did no-one read the news post on gmane.org and then the LGPL?