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From: "Mattmann, Chris A (388J)" <chris.a.mattmann@jpl.nasa.gov>
To: Benson Margulies <bimargulies@gmail.com>
CC: "legal-discuss@apache.org" <legal-discuss@apache.org>,
        Jim Jagielski
	<jim@jagunet.com>
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 07:20:09 -0700
Subject: Re: Building ASL code requiring LGPL 3rd party
Thread-Topic: Building ASL code requiring LGPL 3rd party
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Thanks for sharing your experience, Benson. Appreciate it.

Cheers,
Chris

On Mar 31, 2011, at 6:55 AM, Benson Margulies wrote:

> Chris,
>=20
> CXF has many examples of the use of explicit java reflection to
> exploit optional dependencies. At least one of them has, as I will
> explain,  a slightly cloudy license status. Just grepping for
> 'loadClass' finds dozens of calls. I don't think that any are
> 'category-X' components. In fact, I just grepped, and I'm certain that
> none of them are. In other words, we use the same technology to give
> our users more flexibility and reduce the footprint, even when there's
> no licensing issue.
>=20
> CXF's compass is always http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html.
>=20
> The 'cloudy' case is 'msv', the multi-schema validator. We wanted to
> support XML Schema validation over Stax. This was possible by using
> Woodstox (AL) + MSV (BSD). However, MSV in turn has a dependency on a
> library of schema-related (relaxngDatatype) code that has, well,
> somewhat uncertain parentage. We don't even use this in CXF, since,
> sadly, web services can't do relax-ng.
>=20
> So, the maven poms for CXF simply list MSV as a dependency, and due to
> the wonders of transitive dependency management, relaxngDatatype
> trails along. However, we do NOT include this jar in our release
> packages, and none of our source code actually depends on msv in the
> classpath to compile. If you want schema validation, you must download
> MSV and dependencies and drop them into the classpath. CXF isn't
> compiled against their API; it's all done reflectively.
>=20
> We could be more stringent by listing msv as a maven 'runtime'
> dependency -- that would keep it out of the compilation classpath and
> make it harder to accidently create a source dependency, but we could
> still have automated tests. Or someone could bust our chops to come up
> with some non-maven download scheme.
>=20
> So, someone who downloads CXF source and types 'mvn' ends up with
> relaxngDatatype.jar on their machine. I could imagine taking some flak
> for that. Something tells me that, out in the wilder corners of 7-step
> transitive dependencies, we're not the only ASF package where
> something like this happens. It's awfully hard to keep track of.
>=20
> For a project like Lucene/Solr, with an ant build, the testing problem
> requires the use of the 'optional download' guidelines of the web page
> cited above. The build.xml would need to have an entirely optional
> target which either (a) expected the user to have downloaded the
> radioactive Jar in advance, or (b) downloaded it for them, and then
> ran the tests.
>=20
> --benson


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Chris Mattmann, Ph.D.
Senior Computer Scientist
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA
Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246
Email: chris.a.mattmann@nasa.gov
WWW:   http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


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