From the GNU General Public License:

The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".)

and

You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

and

If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.

These pretty much combine to tell me that since Empeg's libraries were directly ported to Java, they, and thus all of JEmplode including any other libraries I choose to link into it later, must be released under the GPL (or released in multiple "pieces", which isn't really practical for users). Of course, if you take "language" in the first paragraph to mean "spoken language" (ie: translating a program's interface) rather than "programming language) (ie: translating a program's code), then we could release it under a different license; but I'm not at all clear on which one is the correct interpretation.

Perhaps Empeg can release a BSD-licensed version of the emptool libraries? (I think I already asked once, but it never hurts to ask again... :)

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Daniel M. Zimmerman, Caltech Computer Science
Mk.2 #060000058, 36GB
Mk.1 #00101, 10GB