[License-discuss] How to embed Apache v2 software?

[Antoine Thomas]

Kevin, thank you for your answer.

While I understand the point of "this is a lawyer topic", license
compliance in open source can really be a mess to understand even for
lawyer. Particularly, most developers and engineers usually don't care
enough about that (some even don't know that they are authors and that
copyright applies to their work...) and providing a clear information to
them is not easy. There are currently a lot of effort in compliance
automation (ScanCode, Here project, OpenChain, ...) but if there is no
public information about what is compliant with what, really, something is
missing. Perhaps it is time to build this data, with the help of lawyers
and people with experience?

Anyway. I will also check whether the very few projects that are using the
OSL are embedding and distributing Apache v2 libraries or dependencies,
that will be a good start.

If anyone has information about that, really, please tell me. And if you
know a lawyer that have this knowledge, please, tell me too, I am
interested.

Best regards,

Antoine


[image: PrestaShop]
<https://www.prestashop.com/?utm_source=signature&utm_medium=e-mail&utm_campaign=emails-signatures>

Antoine Thomas aka ttoine

Developer Advocate

t: +33 (0)6 63 13 79 06

antoine.thomas at prestashop.com




On Thu, 7 Nov 2019 at 12:07, Kevin P. Fleming <kevin+osi at km6g.us> wrote:

> This is not 'missing' from the OSI website; it's not the OSI's place to
> provide legal advice about compliance with open source licenses. Legal
> advice needs to be provided by a person trained in that profession who has
> agreed to provide such advice to you or your company, typically under some
> sort of contractual agreement.
>
> Since I am not a lawyer, and thus clearly I am not your lawyer, this is
> not legal advice, but: as long as your project doesn't include any software
> under licenses which require *other* software project to be distributed
> under the identical license (as the GPL family of licenses do), then there
> is typically no problem with combining software under many licenses. If you
> are distributing the software's source code along with its licenses and
> copyright notices, then you are probably complying with the terms of the
> licenses.
>
> On Thu, Nov 7, 2019 at 5:05 AM Antoine Thomas <
> antoine.thomas at prestashop.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I was at Linux Open Source Summit in Lyon last week, and one of the most
>> interesting topic was about legal compliance. And, by chance, that's one of
>> my top priority tasks at the moment.
>>
>> I am working on this for the PrestaShop project for some time know, and
>> there is still something not easy to understand: how to embed and
>> re-distribute open source libraries in an open source project. And what
>> license is ok to re-distribute in a project with another license.
>>
>> I looked at the FAQ (https://opensource.org/faq) and there is no answer.
>> Really, that is missing and that should be explained. Maybe there are some
>> resource available I missed?
>>
>> In my particular case:
>> - PrestaShop use Composer (PHP) and NPM (JS) to manage dependencies.
>> - The project is shipped in OSL
>> - Embedding MIT, BSD and ISC (I found ISC on NPM libraries) is fine, the
>> licenses are permissive
>> - It's ok to ship content (like pictures, icons, documents, ...) in
>> Creative Common with clauses "by" and/or "sa" as soon as the origin is clear
>>
>> I am currently listing all the dependencies with versions and licenses
>> (work in progress, not yet public). Most are in MIT, a few in BSD. But
>> there are currently a few libraries available in Apache v2 that are used in
>> PrestaShop. They are not modified, just used by the software, and
>> distributed with the installer in a zip archive.
>>
>> I am looking for advice about that: is it ok to embed some Apache
>> software this way and ship in OSL?
>>
>> My target is to be sure that there is no compliance failure in the
>> project. And also, to set good practice and rules for the contributors in
>> the developer documentation, so they know what is ok and what is not
>> possible.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Antoine
>>
>>
>>
>> [image: PrestaShop]
>> <https://www.prestashop.com/?utm_source=signature&utm_medium=e-mail&utm_campaign=emails-signatures>
>>
>> Antoine Thomas aka ttoine
>>
>> Developer Advocate
>>
>> t: +33 (0)6 63 13 79 06
>>
>> antoine.thomas at prestashop.com
>>
>>
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>>
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