Skip to main content

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [List Home]
[eclipse.org-architecture-council] [Bug 246945] Best Practices for interfacing with libs that are not EPL compatible

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=246945  
Product/Component: Community / Architecture Council

Oisin <ohurley@xxxxxxxx> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |ohurley@xxxxxxxx




--- Comment #3 from Oisin <ohurley@xxxxxxxx>  2008-09-11 07:03:19 -0400 ---
(In reply to comment #2)
> Something like http://www.hibernate.org/ whose home page explicit states
> 
> The LGPL open source license allows the use of Hibernate and NHibernate in open
> source and commercial projects.

Here's a thing - regardless of whether or not the project page says that is ok
to use the software, the *GPL licenses (v2 anyway) have enough ambiguities
that their interpretation will not be consistent and will depend on the reader.

So Hibernate can say - "yes go ahead" - but in fact what you need is an
explicit license to use from them. The message on the web page carries
no appreciable legal weight in the context of a legal argument.

It's the multiple interpretations is the issue, and the fact that there is very
little in the way of precedent at this time.

(Note - I heard all this from a series of NY lawyers all of whom were called
Ira for some reason)

At the risk of boring you senseless with personal experience, the major issue
that *we* experienced  with the LGPL2 was in section 6:

 "...provided that the terms permit
modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse
engineering for debugging such modifications."

the reverse engineering clause was in direct contravention of our clickwrap
license, which prohibited it explicitly. And when you talk about 'debugging'
it's a question of how far do you go? Does debugging extend all the way 
back to the mainline? Or the library API boundary? Who makes that call? 

The result was the IONA legal team advising no LGPL usage in our non-OSS
products.


-- 
Configure bugmail: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are on the CC list for the bug.
You are the assignee for the bug.


Back to the top