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GNU-PaperclipsJava Servlet 2.2 Container |
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GNU-PaperclipsJava Servlet 2.2 Container |
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The GNU General Public Licence
You can read the licence on-line at the FSF website: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.
How the GPL affects using Paperclips
The GNU Public Licence is a software licence which requires software to be distributed for free.Some people have asked if this prevents GNU-Paperclips being used in commercial environments. It doesn't. GNU-Paperclips may be used as a servlet engine in commercial environments.
This means that you can write servlets for your ommercial environment and then load and run them with GNU-Paperclips. This situation is analagous to using a free word processor to write a book which you then sell. The text produced by the word processor is not affected by the licence of the word processor. Another analogy is the use of the GNU/Linux operating system; it is entirely within the licence of the GPL to use GNU/Linux within a commercial environment to run programs.
What you may NOT do is use the extra features GNU-Paperclips provides when writing a commercial servlet. So for example you cannot write a servlet using filters (until Paperclips supports the Servlet API 2.3) without the GPL requiring that you also licence your servlet under the GPL.
We think this is pretty fair... we want to encourage the use of the GPL (as opposed to the Lesser GPL) because this is stated FSF policy so we've licenced the libraries, as well as the engine, under the GPL.
You don't have to use the advanced features of GNU-Paperclips in order to write servlets (indeed some of these features break compatability with the Servlet API) but you can still benefit from the unique administration and architectural benefits of the engine itself. If you do write servlets using GNU-Paperclips libraries you must help promote free software too.
