An explanation of the difficulty of solving licenseproliferation in one sentence
Brian Behlendorf
brian at collab.net
Thu Mar 10 00:59:04 UTC 2005
On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Forrest J. Cavalier III wrote:
> If you are referring to the OpenBSD refusal to accept the Apache 2 license
> was the market working as it should. One or the other will come around
> eventually, or they won't. (It isn't clear to me which the "right" side of
> that particular case is, but OpenBSD was full aware of the consequences
> of going it alone. I wonder if ASF was.....)
Theo's reason for refusal was:
"We've been clear: Their new license contains more stuff, and we do not
accept MORE STUFF in licenses." - Theo
During the 2.0 process (which was more than a few years, and a very open
process) we added requirements with *extreme* reluctance. The one that
has been most controversial was the patent defense clause - which by
itself is almost so toothless as to almost not have been worth it, because
it only harms a company using a Apache package that also wishes to sue
someone over patents in that same Apache package. Most likely someone
wishing to pursue a case does so because they have a competing package the
Apache package disrupts, so they are unlikely to be major users of the
Apache package anyways. We could have made the language more severe -
applying to any Apache package the litigant uses, or even any Open Source
package the litigant uses. I think we could have done more, and Open
Source projects would be wise to consider similar language.
OpenBSD made their decision after our multi-year process concluded, and we
didn't discuss the possibility of a move like that, but I can see they
have no choice if they wish the whole of OpenBSD to remain under the BSD
license and only that. Apache for OpenBSD is still available as a port;
this was for the version included by default as part of the core OS. For
which they probably wanted a much more stripped down web server anyways.
Anyways, yes, it is an example of the marketplace working. It's not
really affected Apache anyways, as I can't say we've had much contribution
from OpenBSD prior to the license change anyway.
I'm sympathetic to the passion in Theo's words - Apache's license is so
permissive for the same reasons, we want our works to be the "Intel
Inside" of other people's works no matter what license, and believe in the
power of the carrot rather than the stick. But I also believe that the
real clear and present danger that Martin Fink and others should be making
noise about is the potential for patents to cause massive pain for all of
us. An out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach to patent licensing like the
MIT and BSD licenses take isn't enough anymore. The problem is so
important, it may even be worth an additional OSD clause requiring some
mutual defense in new licenses to be approved.
The patent defense language the ASL 2.0 adopted happens to be incompatible
with the GPL, despite involving Eben in the drafting of the ASL 2.0 and
not hearing about the incompatibility until after the release. It's our
desire and intent that GPL projects be able to incorporate Apache-licensed
works into GPL projects, despite the fact that we can't do the opposite.
We're just nice like that. So this is a defect; we're working with Eben
now on how to fix it, either in a GPL v3 or an ASL 2.1. If we do a 2.1
the intent would be to license all future Apache releases under that
license. We don't have a relicensing problem because we've taken care to
obtain permission from contributors to release code under the license of
our choice.
Brian
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