[License-discuss] 3rd Party License policy, the board, and the term "FREE"

[Lawrence Rosen]

Larry Rosen asked with respect to certain Tomcat software:
> > Is this third party software that runs in Windows or uses
> > one of several FOSS versions available of OpenSSL?

Mark Thomas replied:
> Not third-party.

Is the copyright owned by Apache Software Foundation? Or is there a specific contributor or company that owns it? 

If all that Apache creates are aggregations, then ASF doesn't own copyrights to the individual contributions. We're like a magazine, publishing multiple articles by contributors together in one release under the overall Apache License 2.0.

We own the aggregation and its copyright.

Individuals and their employers (or contractors) can claim original authorship credit and licensing authority over the contributions. Not ASF.

I wonder how SPDX might require us to document this in our NOTICE file?

> ... not something that needs to be kept on a private list...

That's entirely up to you. I don't know Tomcat and didn't want to worry anyone unnecessarily. That's also why I moved my specific AOO issue to the private list. But unless I say otherwise everything I write here or on any open source list is "Licensed CC-BY 4.0" so copy or quote it anywhere. Thanks.

/Larry

Lawrence Rosen
"If this were legal advice it would have been accompanied by a bill."