"in conjunction"

Posted May 25, 2006 14:35 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
Parent article: How Sun's Java got into Debian

[I posted something similar to this on the Fedora list...]

I think people concerned about the "in conjunction" phrase are misinterpretting. Remember, licenses are written in legalese, which is formed from English words but where the meaning of certain terms is determined by heaps of case law and precedent, not necessarily by the dictionary.

My assumption, given that Sun people say that this clause does not prevent distribution of the JDK _alongside_ GCJ etc., is that people are reading the phrase "in conjunction with" more strongly than it should be. A more narrow reading indicates that you can't use the Sun JVM with GNU Classpath, but you can use and distribute them both _not_ in conjunction.

But really, a lawyer needs to answer this question.

(The new license, by the way, is not helpful for Fedora, which is a pure Free Software distribution. Nor, of course, is it helpful for inclusion in actual Debian.)