Licensing: NAnt tasks

Question

What is the practical meaning of NAnt's license exception:

As a special exception, the copyright holders of this software give you permission to link the assemblies with independent modules to produce new assemblies, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting assemblies under terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module. An independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on these assemblies. If you modify this software, you may extend this exception to your version of the software, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.

Does it mean that I can create non-GPL tasks for NAnt or are they considered not independent enough to be independent modules? NAntContrib has identical license with the same exception, so it does not answer this question.

I understand that formal answer could only be given by a lawyer, but would you consult a lawyer if you wanted to create some things that link to NAnt (like tasks or loggers) in your free time?

Answer 1

I'm not a lawyer, so you might want to ask one before you do anything, but as I understand it, in GPL V2 if you write software that uses libraries licensed under GPL V2 your software becomes a derivative work (even if you're just using them, without having modified them), which means you must release your source code. They later addded a classpath exception, which means that if you just use the libraries unmodified, then your software does not become a derivative work. I think that's what the exception above is addressing.