Mailing-List: contact legal-discuss-help@apache.org; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: legal-discuss@apache.org
Received-SPF: pass (athena.apache.org: domain of sebbaz@gmail.com designates
 209.85.216.50 as permitted sender)
DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws;
        d=gmail.com; s=gamma;
        h=mime-version:date:message-id:subject:from:to:content-type;
        b=marYslmp/gvHHMXiEJzwdCfnuZWaPjSOoL/tT/XO2y/18KLzmFZ1IelKtHxDrj1PKi
         XVqBrZuD8bb+F+00TqdpyHjt97BTBQEY6McEUhkDznY9zLB4pMVvyq9sDeypIKyiSmp0
         R8TUnudbOoFHo7gRtZ3LK5iNxcUIVgPpH/acU=
MIME-Version: 1.0
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:16:00 +0100
Message-ID: <AANLkTindNXZJoTjrXhcah8s3xa9WbX-dMMh2b_28n=MU@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: LGPL dependencies for JMeter
From: sebb <sebbaz@gmail.com>
To: legal discuss <legal-discuss@apache.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Sorry to bring this up again so soon, but the complicated thread about
Lucene/Solr has not dealt with the question we would like answered,

There are two proposed patches for JMeter, both of which use LGPL libraries.

* One is adding an AMF sampler, which would use Adobe Blaze - LGPL3
* Another adds a graphing visualiser using JChart2D - LGPL v2.1

Both would be strictly optional.
There are lots of samplers other than AMF, and many visualisers.

I think this meets the #optional criteria - and we would ensure that
JMeter still ran without the libraries present.

As far as I can make out, using reflection to link to LGPL is
acceptable, even if not exactly encouraged. And this would have no
effect on the build process.

Q1. Is it OK to provide LGPL glue code (source and binary) using reflection [1]?

Now the ASF developers (and particularly the RM) would need to
download the LGPL library in order to develop and test the glue code.

This suggests an alternative that might be easier to develop and
maintain, which is to build the glue code without using reflection.
Obviously, we would need to ensure that users could still build from
source without downloading the LGPL libraries. This is quite easy in
Ant.

Seems to me that this scenario is covered by the following section,
but I could be wrong:

http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#prohibited

Q2. Is that an acceptable alternative to using reflection only?


[1] Obviously the glue code would not function without the library
present, but we would ensure that this only affected the particular
sampler or visualiser. This applies whether or not reflection is used.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: legal-discuss-unsubscribe@apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: legal-discuss-help@apache.org