So let me get this straight... RoboVM is acquired by Xamarin, the company behind Mono (the open source c# implementation)... and they therefore go closed source?
I don't get it.
I don't get it.
RoboVM is a complicated piece of technology that we have worked hard for years to create. Over the past few months, we have seen competitors actively exploiting our good faith by using our open source code to compete with us directly in commercial products. On the flip side, we have received almost no meaningful contributions to our open source code. You can imagine how disappointing this has been to us; we had hoped our initial business model of OSS with proprietary extensions (like our debugger and interface builder integration) would work. But in light of the low contributions and behavior of competitors, we decided to stop automatically releasing changes to the core of RoboVM as open source.
Citation? I've never heard anyone interpret the GPL and LGPL as the same.
Embedding mono is different than using mono. https://xamarin.com/licensing
From what I understand lot of code is GPLv2 as well, which would make the project as a whole GPLv2 licensed.
From http://www.mono-project.com/docs/faq/licensing/
The C# compiler is dual-licensed under the MIT/X11 license and the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The tools are released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The runtime libraries are under the GNU Library GPL 2.0 (LGPL 2.0).
The class libraries are released under the terms of the MIT X11 license.
When distributed 'as a whole' it is distributed under the terms of GPLv2.
The runtime libraries (LGPL) and class libraries are indeed not under GPLv2 .
Since they don't have access to the source code, they can't fulfill the legal obligation outlined in the GPL license.