[josm-dev] Possible copyright violation

[Giovanni Mascellani]

Hi all!

Since about the start of June JOSM gets compiled with some pieces of
code coming from the ANT codebase, which are copyrighted by the Apache
Foundation and are distributed under an Apache 2.0 license.
Unfortunately this license is not compatible with GPL-2[1], so these two
licenses cannot mixed up like what you are currently doing with JOSM. I
don't know whether the ANT project or the Apache Foundation would sue
you for this (and I'm not tied at all with them, nor speak on their
behalf), but, for what I understand, compiling JOSM is illegal.

 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License#GPL_compatibility

Fortunately GPL-3 is not incompatible with Apache-2.0, so I think you
could upgrade all your code to GPL-3 and avoid any problem. This, for
instance, would enable me to package and upload latest JOSM release to
Debian.

Thank you, Giovanni.
-- 
Giovanni Mascellani <g.mascellani at gmail.com>
Pisa, Italy

Web: http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~mascellani
Jabber: g.mascellani at jabber.org / giovanni at elabor.homelinux.org
GPG: 0x5F1FBF70 (FP: 1EB6 3D43 E201 4DDF 67BD  003F FCB0 BB5C 5F1F BF70)


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