Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

Why GPL should not impede using JSE

I've looked at JSE more carefully and I believe GPL should not be an impediment in using it. The reason is that JSE is used as a preprocessor and none of its code is actually linked in the resulting binary. JSE simply transforms everything to pure Java code which should compile cleanly on any JVM.

Now the only question is whether the macros defined by developers are covered by GPL or not. To me it appears that if the macro is just a syntax object, and does not depend on any of the classes JSE uses, the code is clean and the macro could be released under any license. And most of the time developers would develop such macros without going into the guts of JSE.