Blogging Roller

There have been a number of somewhat confusing announcements and threads regarding the open source licenses that are popular among Java developers: APL, LGPL, MPL and CDDL. Here's my take on a couple of those items.

Open office goes LGPL

The first announcement regards LGPL and SISSL. Sun has retired the SISSL and the Sun-sponsored Open Office project will be making all subsequent releases under the LGPL license. This doesn't mean that Sun is moving en masse to LGPL as at least one Java blogger seems to think. It just means that the OpenOffice folks decided that LGPL is the best license for their product.

JSF goes CDDL

The next announcement regards CDDL and JSF. Sun has released its Java ServerFaces implementation under the CDDL. Some Java sites covered this as news, but I don't think it is all that newsworthy. Sun had already released its J2EE implementation Glassfish under CDDL and J2EE now includes JSF, so most license savvy folks probably already assumed that JSF was under CDDL.

Apache and the LGPL

And finally, we come to the touchy topic of Apache and the LGPL. Apache is close to deciding a policy to define how LGPL components may be used in official Apache releases. Does this mean that Apache projects can now use and ship LGPL components. No, not yet. Cliff Schmidt announced the proposed policy and that policy was to be voted on by the Apache board on Aug. 17, but I've heard no news of this.

In case you're wondering what this might mean to Roller, the proposed policy allowed Apache projects to depend on third-party LGPL components but not to ship them. For Roller, that would mean that we can keep on using Hibernate, but we'd have to ask people to download the Hibernate jars separately from Roller. That's unpleasant, but it's not too bad, I guess. If you read the email thread that Cliff's email started you'll see that some folks would like to allow Apache projects to ship third-party LGPL components, but not to have hard dependencies on them. For Roller, that's actually worse. We'd have to support an alternative non-Hibernate implementation of the Roller backend. We've been there and done that (i.e. supported both a Hibernate and Castor/JDO backend) and it was not an experience that I'd like to repeat. I wonder what happened in that Aug. 17 board meeting.

I'd also hoped to answer the question posed by Geert Bevin on The Server Side: What's the best developer-friendly open-source license for Java products, but that'll have to wait for a later post.