[License-discuss] [FTF-Legal] Proposal: Apache Third Party License Policy

[Mike Milinkovich]

On 20/05/2015 4:40 PM, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
> Apache Legal JIRA-218 asked:
>>> >>My question is about whether "Eclipse Public License -v 1.0"
>>> >>is compatible with our Apache License 2.0.
>>> >>I couldn't find an answer onhttps://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html.

This was at addressed in the now apparently defunct ASF document 
entitled "Drafted (and out of date) Third-Party Licensing Policy" that 
Cliff Schmidt wrote years ago. You can still find the text of the 
document at [1]. Unfortunately the version that is linked from the 
Apache Legal page[2] has somehow been mangled. As far as I know, that 
document was used for quite a few years as the main guidance for Apache 
projects on these topics. I am not quite sure why it was deprecated 
without a replacement. The fact that a reference to the EPL wasn't 
migrated to [3] just seems kinda weird.

In that document, the EPL was included in the list of "Category B: 
Reciprocal Licenses". As I understand it, the guidance to ASF projects 
was the EPL-licensed binaries could be distributed by Apache projects, 
but that the source should be only available by reference. It is my 
understanding that Apache projects do distribute EPL-licensed modules, 
such as the Eclipse Compiler for Java (ecj).

One thing that seems sort of weird is that the release notes[4] for 
Apache Tomcat 7 contains a notice(*) regarding the use of ecj under the 
EPL. But the release notes[5] for Tomcat v8.0 does not contain the 
notice, even though the "ecj-4.4.2.jar (Eclipse JDT Java compiler)" is 
listed as a bundled dependency.

Hope that helps.

[1] 
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/infrastructure/site/trunk/archive/legal/3party.mdtext
[2] http://apache.org/legal/
[3] http://apache.org/legal/resolved.html
[4] https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/RELEASE-NOTES.txt
[5] https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.0-doc/RELEASE-NOTES.txt

(*) In addition, Tomcat 7.0 uses the Eclipse JDT Java compiler for
compiling JSP pages.  This means you no longer need to have the complete
Java Development Kit (JDK) to run Tomcat, but a Java Runtime Environment
(JRE) is sufficient.  The Eclipse JDT Java compiler is bundled with the
binary Tomcat distributions.  Tomcat can also be configured to use the
compiler from the JDK to compile JSPs, or any other Java compiler supported
by Apache Ant.

-- 
Mike Milinkovich
mike.milinkovich at eclipse.org
+1.613.220.3223 (mobile)