[jcifs] Licensing question.
Michael B. Allen
miallen at eskimo.com
Mon Jul 22 19:13:44 EST 2002
On Mon, 22 Jul 2002 08:44:15 +0200
Torgny Johansson <torjo845 at student.liu.se> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've written a small program using your library, and I was wondering how I'm
> allowed to distribute it.
> I've read the license, but I'm still a bit confused.
>
> I'm not allowed to distribute only your jcifs.jar file in my own package? Or
> am I?
Yes, you CAN distribute jcifs.jar only. You can also un-jar the jar and
re-jar the class files however you like. Or you could not use a jar at all.
Jar files are just packaging; the class files themselves are what count.
And you do not need to mention "jcifs" or otherwise give credit to anyone.
In fact I would prefer that you did NOT mention "jcifs" or put any jcifs
associated e-mail addresses in your distribution sources, READMEs, Release
Notes, web pages, etc ... because your clients should hold you solely
responsible for the code you're giving them. That way, you can interpret
problems before redirecting to us if necessary. And if your code sucks it
doesn't make us look bad too :-)
HOWEVER! If you *modify* the jcifs library you have to give out the source
to those changes along with the binaries (the new jar). If it's some
trivial change like adding a property to change some setting or a mkdirs()
method that just calls mkdir() recursively or similar triviality then no
one will care (but if you're asked, technically, your expected to produce
working source code). If you just change the access modifiers from
'protected' or nothing to 'public' just to expose lower level interfaces I
WILL BE VERY UPSET because this is not the spirit of the LGPL license. If
you write a DCE/RPC implementation and sell or give away the result outside
of your company, government, or "entity", then we definately want the
source and are legally entitled to it.
LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Assume that nothing I've written here is correct. If you
want legal advise, hire a qualified attorney to instruct you on the meaning
of the GNU LGPL in the context of your application.
--
A program should be written to model the concepts of the task it
performs rather than the physical world or a process because this
maximizes the potential for it to be applied to tasks that are
conceptually similar and more importantly to tasks that have not
yet been conceived.
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