Licensing issue

[cursive-ide]

Hawk currently depends on the Barbary WatchService. They don't advertise it very clearly on their website, but it's under the GPL v2 because it includes OpenJDK code - see here for details. This means that it can't be used in Hawk since the GPL v2 is incompatible with the EPL, and would be virally transmitted to Hawk's users anyway. There's also a comment in the thread that makes it pretty clear that it's not actively maintained.

There's an alternative clean room implementation here (linked in that thread) which is under ASL. Unfortunately it's unclear how mature it is, and the API is also different. I'm going to investigate it a bit for my own use, but in the meantime sadly the best option for Hawk is to remove the Barbary dependency.

[wkf]

Oh man that's a real bummer. Let me look into this too. I should have some time soon. Sorry for any problems this has caused!

[cursive-ide]

No worries, it hasn't caused me any issues, I was just investigating my options when I discovered this.

I heard back from the developer of directory-watcher, and it's been stable for him, at least, and he's been using it for a couple of years. I've just started using it and on OSX at least I'm not seeing any problems. The API is nice and simple too, it would probably make Hawk something like 50 lines of code since it does the platform-specific switching internally.

[cursive-ide]

on OSX at least I'm not seeing any problems...

Unfortunately this turns out to not be true: takari/directory-watcher#10.

[rachbowyer]

Hi, I was wondering if there has been an progress on this issue. We use Hawk as a transitive dependency via figwheel-sidecar. Although figwheel-sidecar is only a development dependency, we try to keep our dependencies free of the GPL - partly due to licence compatibility issues mentioned above and also as we have proprietary code.