Geronimo accused of LGPL violations [LWN.net]

Geronimo is a project being run under the Apache Software Foundation; it is an attempt to create a free J2EE implementation under the Apache license. As such, it is a direct competitor to JBoss, a commercially-supported project which licenses its code under the Lesser GPL. The JBoss Group has evidently been sufficiently concerned about Geronimo to be watching the project and digging through its code repository. They didn't like what they found; on November 10, the Apache Software Foundation received a letter (PDF format) from JBoss's lawyers alleging that code had been copied from JBoss into Geronimo.

Copying of code between free software projects is not always a concern; indeed, the freedom to do so is one of the things that makes free software great. This copying cannot happen, however, if the two projects do not have compatible licenses. The JBoss code is licensed under the LGPL; creating a derived product of that code under the Apache license is not an action that the LGPL allows. So, if this copying has actually occurred, and the person contributing the code to Geronimo did not have the right to do so (by actually owning the copyright on that code, for example), the JBoss Group may have a real point.

It would have been nice to resolve this issue without bringing in the lawyers. Even so, the tone of the letter distinguishes the JBoss group from other companies which have been claiming that their code was copied. The letter proceeds on the assumption that any such copying was not done intentionally, and it provides some actual code examples. The Geronimo project has responded accordingly; if there is any LGPL code in Geronimo, they don't want it there and they will take the appropriate steps to get rid of it.

Thus far, however, the Geronimo developers seem unconvinced by the JBoss Group's claims. An examination of the examples provided by JBoss suggests that the code in question may have a right to be there. Indeed, some of it appears to be derived from other Apache-licensed code which somehow lost its copyright notices on its way into JBoss. One of the code examples is no longer in the current Geronimo code base, and has not been for a couple of months.

This is a situation which bears watching. The free software community truly does not need a legal battle between two of its projects. It does appear that the right things are being done, however; with luck, this situation will be resolved in a friendly and professional manner, and without further involvement of lawyers.

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Geronimo accused of LGPL violations

Posted Nov 13, 2003 16:32 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I think it would actually be potentially good to have a demonstration of
two open source projects working out who owns what and fixing their
codebases and attributions accordingly. It sends the message that we
actually do care about copyrights and are quite willing to resolve
situations if they have been demonstrated. For that matter, it gives a
public example of what happens if (L)GPL code ends up in a different
project: someone sends you a letter, and you have to take out the code
you don't own. While this has been demonstrated by other projects in
other instances, this is possibly the first time the activity is
documented entirely.