Re: java.awt status LGPL -> GPL?

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 03:51:44PM -0800, Paul Fisher wrote:
> Mark Wielaard <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > I was not aware that the license of the awt classes should have been
> > changed from LGPL to GPL.
> 
> The AWT classes are GPL'd.  New licensing headers need to be checked
> into CVS.  If someone could go ahead and do this, that would be a
> help.  I haven't had time to do so.

I am a bit annoyed by this. Why was this never clearly announced!

I must not be the only one that missed the fact that we suddenly
changed from LGPL to GPL. I actually searched through the archives
to make sure I didn't miss any discussion about this and I couldn't
find anything about it!

> > Note that GCC 3.0.x ships with a partial AWT implementation under
> > GPL+exception.
> 
> The AWT files that are part of the GCC release are GPL'd.  The
> licensing information at the top of such files is incorrect.
Are you sure the libgcj people know about this?!?!

I really like working on Classpath and libgcj. But the AWT situation is
not funny anymore. I was hoping for months that there would be some
clearification or consensus on this issue. I would have loves to work on
finishing the AWT but I have not looked at the code since I wanted to
wait till we had decided to go forward with the LGPLed Classpath or
the GPL+exception libgcj implementation. If anybody had clued me in that
both versions were actually under the same license I could have started
merging a long long time ago! (Although working on a GPLed implementation
now that we have a AWT implementation under a Apache style license
available, which Acunia seems to want to actually make GPL compatible,
does not make much sense to me anymore.)

Could you please explain how AWT is defined? I have done a little work
on java.awt.datatransfer, which has not much to do with the rest of AWT
except for its package name, would that now also fall under GPL? Does it
include packages not in the Kaffe implementation like java.awt.geom,
java.awt.color or java.awt.print? What about packages that depend on
AWT classes like java.applet or java.beans?

Thanks,

Mark
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