Firstly I'd like to say I'm no lawyer or apart of the FSF, I work on a GPL project which uses hibernate. And have been going through a licensing audit of our software. We used dom4j ourselves in another project, and ended up having to replace and rewrite the section of code to use the xom library.
From what I can see the dom4j license is similar to the old apache 1.0 and 1.1 licenses, specifically clause 4:
Quote:
4. Products derived from this Software may not be called "DOM4J"
nor may "DOM4J" appear in their names without prior written
permission of MetaStuff, Ltd. DOM4J is a registered
trademark of MetaStuff, Ltd.
According to the
FSF licenses site, under apache 1.1 license reasons it is incompatible is the above naming restriction clause.
Quote:
This is a permissive non-copyleft free software license. It has a few requirements that render it incompatible with the GNU GPL, such as strong prohibitions on the use of Apache-related names.
Sure there is nothing wrong with using the dom4j library, its the distribution only.. so when we distribute the hibernate jar files dom4j is a required library. If we add it to our "distribution" we are in violation, if we don't then our uses can't use the software until they download and add the dom4j jar to there classpath.. this seems annoying but if we have to then there is nothing else we can do.
I thought I bring this to everyones intention.. sure I may be wrong, again I am no lawyer, alot of people say, until its proven in court its ok, or that noone will sue you if you do use dom4j, sure.. I guess, but I want to do the right thing.
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