[kepler-dev] GEON and jgss.jar and licensing

[David Welker]

Hi all,

I am busy investigating jar files for license terms and sometimes for  
function. One jar I was looking at is jgss.jar. If you look inside,  
you see that it contains the package org.ietf.jgss and implements Java  
General Security Services (JGSS) in a handful of classes. In Java 6,  
this jar is definitely unnecessary, as the functionality of this jar  
is definitely incorporated into the JDK. I know that this jar is also  
unnecessary in Java 1.5 on the Mac, as I deleted it and everything  
still compiled fine despite a clear compile time dependency.  
Basically, there is only a single import that uses this jar, namely  
org.geon.FTPClient which may be found in the actors module. The jar  
itself is stored in the core module.

So, anyway, I was wondering if I could get someone to check out a  
Windows machine and a Linux machine and whether or not jgss.jar can be  
deleted from the core module when running Java 1.5 and whether  
org.geon.FTPClient in the actors module will still compile after doing  
so. I tried downloading the JDK 1.5 on Mac for Windows, but  
unfortunately instead of a .zip or .tar.gz file that I could extract  
and look at, these files are either .bin or .exe files and therefore  
not easy for me to get at the internals to verify that this jar is in  
fact unnecessary.

I would really like to delete this jar if it is not needed even though  
it is indeed very small. I am trying to bring the documentation on the  
third party jars we use to a higher standard, and I have spent hours  
trying to find license terms for jgss.jar and I have failed to do so.  
I cannot even find where the jar can be downloaded from as an original  
matter. I am fairly certain that jgss.jar is licensed appropriately  
for commercial use, as it has now been incorporated into the JDK  
itself. But, not having documentation to that effect is below the  
standard I would like to establish for our use of third-party  
dependencies.

Anyway, if anyone has access to a Windows or Linux machine and can try  
compiling after deleting and report back the results, it would be  
appreciated.

Thanks,
David