I pulled some code from Spring, the parts which have to do with resources and the utility classes. Also the required code from maven (for version parsing etc).
The maven code should stay (maybe some methods are not used, we will need to prune).
From the Spring code I need to check what is used and what is not. The problem is when working with virtual FS like the one in jboss/wildfly. There is no easy way to get access to jar internals (we are looking from maven side-artifacts which are nested in groupid/artifactId directories). Spring seems to have this working (with a minor tweak for setting the cllassloder before calling the spring methods) and it does work inside HA.
The thing with the classes being copied, I saw the code. Jboss creates a class loader for each module (oops!) and this is an overhead. They have an osgi-like deployment structure, lots of modules are loaded from the server itself and this can explain the delays you were explaining yesterday.
Thing is, most of these don't really need HA loaded... Maybe, we could work on this...
Can be solved if HA plugins are copied lazily. When some @OnClassLoad is triggered. But some plugins will be copied everytime since the watch is triggered with wildcard *
This is problem only with OSGI based app servers like wildfly
May be it can be solved in another way, we can copy HA classes only if exists the hotswap-agent.properties file in the deployment and hook this feature with command line argument
As far as licence, the Apache licence header is enough and you already have it in the code. May be we didn't understand each other in that.