Apache style issue

[John Cowan]

Dag-Erling Smørgrav scripsit:

> > > No, the Apache license is significantly more restrictive than the
> > > BSD and MIT licenses.
> >
> > Characterization of the levels of restrictions is always dangerous.
> 
> I'm sorry, but it is an undeniable fact that the Apache license imposes
> restrictions that neither the BSD nor MIT licenses do, but *not* vice
> versa; hence, the Apache license is more restrictive - or to put it
> another way, the set of permissions granted by the Apache license is a
> strict subset of the set of permissions granted by the BSD or MIT
> license.

It is also an undeniable fact that plain pizza is a strict subset of
pepperoni pizza, but both would be well described as "pizza-style dishes".
If we are to generalize across licenses at all, we must be prepared
to blur certain details.  I consider the additional restrictions of
the Apache license to constitute such details.  Naturally, the details
become important when you are actually making use of works under license,
but not when discussing licenses in general.

As I read it, there are three such restrictions: you must preserve the
license itself and all relevant notices, including any in a NOTICE file;
you must mark your changes; you give up the right to sue the licensor
in certain cases.  All of these are trivial to achieve, and IMO are what
a morally worthy person would do anyhow.

In any case, it's far from clear that the BSD license grants the
right to use the licensor's patents that read on the subject matter,
and although the MIT license contains the magic words "use" and "sell"
associated with patent grants, MIT itself denies that it ever granted a
patent license in that way.  So the Apache permissions, which do include
a clear patent license, may not be a subset of the BSD/MIT ones.

> BTW, parts of the Apache license are actually not license grants or
> conditions, but terms of service for the Apache mailing lists, bug
> repository etc.

All that says is that the definition of a contribution to the project
includes materials posted in a certain way, whether formally marked as
contributions or not.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan at ccil.org   http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
O beautiful for patriot's dream that sees beyond the years
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