Can I embed the haxe compiler as a maven-central package?

[soywiz]

For JTransc I would want to download the Haxe compiler automatically and use it.

That way a person using JTransc could use it directly just using maven or gradle just as people is used to do, also it will use a version that it is know to work with JTransc.

I could just download it from the CDN, uncompress it, cache it and so on.

But the easiest way to do this would be to embed the haxe compiler (zips for windows/linux/mac) and upload them to maven central, so maven or gradle just download them as a dependency. Also it would be distributed and packaged in a standar way and could be used with maven/gradle caches. So I like the idea.

But before doing any of this I just wanted to ask if it is legal / the Haxe compiler license allows it.

[soywiz]

Well. I suppose this is a question no-one wants to reply just in case :)

In the end I have read licenses: MIT and GPLv2. I don't see any limitation on distribution as long as I keep it free, unmodified and include license information on it. So I will link to http://haxe.org/foundation/open-source.html and include or bundle the original zips that already includes the LICENSE.txt file. If you find out that I cannot do this, please let me know.

Anyway I wanted to write about this before doing it.

Crosslink: https://github.com/jtransc/jtransc/issues/43

[JLM]

soywiz

I did look at the time of your post and read the GPLv2 licences and around the internet, and how java developers used stuff like maven but since "jars" are java source ( being a fancy zip file ) the rules seem somewhat different.  It seems the important aspect is that you provide the full source from the same location as the binary although it seems you could potentially provide that from a slightly different place if the license and a file with the link, were with the binary and if that was made that very clear. 

But after quite a bit of reading I felt it was not my place to try to advise on aspects that I was unsure around.  I presume that really you should ask Andy Li to prepare a Maven version with a modified licence that protects Haxe suitably but make distribution as an unmodified officially approved binary from Maven simpler, and for him to upload it? But indead it's a tricky area, I think it's really for the Haxe Foundation to provide a Maven version with a modified GPLv2 licence that states the source code is on the haxefoundation github, and this probably falls under Andy's role after he has double checked with Nicolas?

But yep just replying because as you say you got no specific advise or suggestions, I think you need to open an issue on haxe github repository with my suggested request.

Best

Justin

[soywiz]

Thanks for replying! :)

I have already completed the task. But right now I'm downloading it from the haxe website to totally avoid the problem you described.

The problem is that maven has lots of mirrors (no single point of failure) and you can define your own (artifactory for example) or totally download from your local network, and in the java world usually the complete download chain is done though maven.

So even when not strictly required, it would be pretty recommendable to have like that.

I will create the issue.

Thanks!