I'll offer my own view, with complete respect for the view Ville promotes. In my case, when I worked for Science Commons, we chose to license software using BSD because in our view getting the ideas out to the widest audience was the biggest win. The situation with ABCL is different in a couple of ways that do matter. In our case we were promoting new semweb tech, and we were not working with a code base with a long lineage of contributors who had participated under the premise of ABCL's license choice. As Ville's view exemplifies, it woild be difficult, at this point, to relicense ABCL.
Still, I believe the goal of wide dissemination and use is part of the ethos, so I would search for a way to somehow make it possible to use the project. To that end I have a few suggestions. 1) To the extent that the testing of the classpath clause is an unknown, perhaps we (ABCL's developers) could offer a memorandum of understanding that clarifies that we will not initiate legal action if the provisions of the license are followed, regardless of future legal developments. 2) Steve, you could budget at least a relatively small sum of money for support of the project. There is a fund that Mark set up to which I have and will continue to contribute. 3) I have had a decent amount of experience (despite that IANAL) with talking with legal and business types about use of free software, and successfully lobbied a pharmaceutical company I work with to both use GPL software and subsequently release software I wrote while working there, when I left the company. If you would like to contact me privately we can discuss the specifics of your situation and ways you might approach gaining consent to use ABCL under it's current license.
Regards,
Alan
On Sunday, August 9, 2020, Ville Voutilainen <ville.voutilainen@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Aug 2020 at 11:59, Mark Evenson <evenson@panix.com> wrote:
>> Describing my offer to be willing consider relicensing ABCL with proper
>> financial and legal support for the work it would entail is hardly “cold”. If
>> you derive commercial value from something, you should be prepared to partake
>> in the externality costs involved in the creating the financial value you seek
>> to extract.
>
> Greetings. My contributions to ABCL are not up for relicensing to
> bsd/mit/apache; they were written
> under the expectation that ABCL is and will remain GPL.
>
> Thank you, and have a nice day.
>
>