[AGENT++] Agent++ license clarification

[Frank Fock]

Hi Torsten,

Which source files are you referring to?

The AGENT++ sources are released under the Apache 2 license.
There are a few files, however, that have been generated based
on templates licensed under that Apache 2 license using
the genclass of the libg++. The resulting code files are originally
licensed under the Library GNU Public License 2 as stated
by genclass in the generated files.

Although the sources are included in the AGENT++ distribution,
the genclass generated files can be and should be treated as
if there were functions of the libc++ dynamically used by the
final executable.
You may ask very rightly "why?". The answer is a bit technical
and historic:

The genclass mechanism was created because the g++ template
engine was not able to generate container classes in a proper way
as nowadays provided by the C++ standard library.

Therefore the code provided by those source files is indeed
virtually part of the C++ library but is used by AGENT++ like
one would use a C++ standard library collection class when the
compiler would expand the collection template on a concrete
AGENT++ class during compile time.

This is exactly the use of those files in the AGENT++ library.
As a consequence, those files do not impose the requirement
to license any of the other AGENT++ sources under the (L)GPL.
Otherwise, this would be also the fact for any sources that use
the (GNU) C++ standard library.

The old genclass code has not been replaced by C++ standard lib
collections yet, because of backward compatibility reasons.
In a next major version, this break/change will be done though.

Does this help?

Best regards,
Frank

Am 08.10.2015 um 12:52 schrieb Torsten Fleischer:
> Hi,
>
> the Agent++ library is licensed under the terms of Apache 2.0.
>
> But I found some files in the source code that contain a copyright notice
> refering to GPL:
>
>          Copyright (C) 1988 Free Software Foundation
>              written by Doug Lea (dl at rocky.oswego.edu)
>
>          This file is part of the GNU C++ Library.  This library is free
>          software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of
>          the GNU Library General Public License as published by the Free
>          Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
>          option) any later version.  This library is distributed in the hope
>          that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the
>          implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
>          PURPOSE.  See the GNU Library General Public License for more details.
>          You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public
>          License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software
>          Foundation, 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
>
> This confuses me somewhat. Are these files licensed under Apache or GPL?
> Does this copyright really apply?  I don't think that these files are part of
> the GNU C++ library.
>
>
> Best Regards,
> Torsten Fleischer
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> AGENTPP at agentpp.org
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