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

[William A Rowe Jr]

On May 25, 2015 1:54 PM, "Lawrence Rosen" <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
> An important part of the proposed Apache Third Party License Policy is
that we finally leave the sad domain of FOSS license compatibility
determination to our friends and experts at OSI.

As you would readily acknowledge, OSI are not 'our' lawyers.  And further,
they are generally not speaking as the license authors' lawyers, either.

Their work informs and advises the ASF and many other producers and
consumers of OSS.  That alone is sufficient.

> If we have a question about whether a specific FOSS license "infects"
Apache code, ask OSI at license-discuss at opensource.org. That's not ASF's
expertise. Our PMCs and certainly our board of directors are not qualified
to maintain complex "A, B and X" lists of FOSS licenses and exceptions.

As stated earlier in the thread, where the license appears to be on the B
or X schedule of licenses.  Asking the author is always the right call.
Most especially when the author forks a license.  When we and the author
understand the author's desires, they are often very willing to dual or
re-license to accomplish their objective.

If their objectives collide with ours, our works won't be based on theirs.
If there is a way to offer a package which combines functional ASF works
with functional 3rd party reciprocally licensed works, this should be
explored, but not as ASF "releases".

> And so in open source, different organizations can play their own
important roles in our ecosystem. All this without turning one FOSS
developer against another FOSS developer here at Apache merely because of
their choice of wonderful FOSS license.

I haven't seen this occur, as the license policy in oral and written
tradition has been passed down since the foundation's creation, and
familiarity with ASF license restriction policies is part of a project's
admission through the incubator.

There are places to originate both weak and strong copy-left works, this is
not one of those places.

Your comments suggest the software authors are ignorant of licensing law,
and should leave it entirely up to the lawyers; that in the perfect world
there would be only 1 license needed for OSS efforts.  That there are a
number of legitimately differing licenses reflects that differences of
intent do exist, and pontificating that all OSI licenses are one does not
make it so.
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