aopalliance.jar license.

[ajoseph]

Rod,
Noticed that the spring is distributed under apache license while the aopalliance.jar file is made available under LGPL. People in the know tell me that this could have viral implications when distributing an application using Spring which uses Spring aop. Are there any plans to change the license for aopalliance or is this something you do not have any control over?

[Rod Johnson]

One person asked before and I sounded out others on the AOP Alliance about changing license. I think it would be possible.

However, LGPL != GPL. So I'm not sure that viral concerns apply.

The best place for this discussion would be the AOP Alliance list.

[gpoirier]

AFAIK, the LGPL licence only constraint if you change the code of the library. It's the GPL that is viral even if you just link to the jar. So it doesn't cause any problem as long as you don't modify the source code and recompile it, and then redistribute it. Same goes for Hibernate for example. I'm no lawyer, but that's my understanding of [L]GPL.

[smccrory]

Yep, that's how my company reads the LGPL as well (we're prohibited from using full GPL libraries unless the product is explicitly going to be GPLed).
Scott

[Rod Johnson]

This license change has now been agreed on the AOP Alliance list.

[Vidigiani]

Where did you find the license for AOP Alliance? I'm holding on using the AOP side of Spring Framework because I can't find a license to run by our legal dept. I looked in the AOP alliance download and the website.

[trisberg]

It was mentioned on the mailing list a while ago. The distribution does not have any licensing info. The license agreed upon now is Public Domain.