On Nov 4, 2004, at 5:15 AM, Elliotte Harold wrote:
dom4j appears to be in violation of the GNUJAXP License unless it has
special permission from the FSF. Does it?
It may be, but since it is being brought up, it looks as if the GNU
JAXP project is in violation of the Aelfred license as well. See
below.
Specifically the latest release of dom4j (and probably earlier
releases) has taken the code from GNU JAXP, *modified it*, and
incorporated it into its code base which is published under a BSD
license. They are not merely linking to the GPL code as permitted by
the GPL with library exception.
The modifications are probably not major. The only one I know of is
changing the package name to org.dom4j.aelfred and org.dom4j.aelfred2
instead of gnu.jaxp.aelfred/gnu.jaxp.aelfred2 though there may be
others. I suspect the problem might be able to be cured by linking to
the unmodified gnujaxp.jar instead of incorporating the Gnu code
directly in the dom4j code base.
After looking at the code, the package names are
org.dom4j.io.[aelfred|aelfred2], just to be correct. Upon first look,
the package org.dom4j.io.aelfred package looks as if it just a straight
copy of the Aelfred code, which is not under the GPL, so that looks
fine.
The package org.dom4j.io.aelfred2, however contains the GPL headers in
the code, so it looks as if dom4j is in violation. However, I would
also say that the GNU JAXP project is in violation of the orignal
license, as the changes made are not 'clearly documented'. Refer to
the aelfred license, and the sentence stating: "You are free to modify
AElfred for your own use and
// to redistribute AElfred with your modifications, provided that the
// modifications are clearly documented."
Are there any changes? If there are, dom4j is in violation as well as
GNU JAXP. If there are no changes, then dom4j may just import the
original non-GPL sources, and there are no violations.
Viewing the cvsweb for GNU JAXP, it seems that there are some changes.
Scott Sanders
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