Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Contact Us	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ	Sponsors

All rights reserved

Posted Jan 17, 2013 0:25 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
In reply to: All rights reserved by mjw
Parent article: A discordant symphony

Well, if there is a license statement for the codebase as a whole, I would expect that it applies to all the files in the codebase. Specific files in the codebase may grant additional permissions, but unless the overall license statement states that some files are not covered by it, I would expect that you are on solid ground treating all files as if they are covered by that statement. IANAL

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Jan 17, 2013 0:28 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

For the curious, this is the full text of the README file at the top of the Symphony tree.

Apache OpenOffice.org Contribution Readme file

Name: IBM Lotus Symphony Contribution to the Apache OpenOffice Project
Contributors: IBM Corporation
License: Apache License Version 2.0
License URL: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

This package contains software source code that IBM desires to contribute to
the Apache Software Foundation under a Software Grant and Corporate Contributor
License Agreement ("SGA "). A set of Third Party Library files are provided under
their existing open source software licenses and a set of Apache OpenOffice v3.4
file are provided under the Apache v2 license as well. IBM's contributed files are
based on the source code of IBM Lotus Symphony v3.0.1.

The files in the contributed package are in four categories:
1) Original Oracle owned files that IBM downloaded from the Oracle Openoffice.org
website - this includes both unmodified files as well as files that were modified by IBM.
The IBM owned materials are contributed under the SGA, the Oracle owned materials
are provided under the Apache v2 license. The total constitutes approximately 56,000 files.
2) IBM owned files. This constitutes approximately 12000 files.
3) Files downloaded from Apache OpenOffice v3.4 under the Apache v2 license. This
constitutes approximately 250 files.
4) Third Party Library files that are under an open source license. This constitutes
approximately 150 files.
Please refer to the list contained in the Software Grant and Corporate Contributor License
Agreement for more information.

Note: Files that are created or modified by IBM and contain IBM owned materials include
file headers of the following form:
/************************************************************************
*
* Licensed Materials - Property of IBM.
* (C) Copyright IBM Corporation 2003, 2012. All Rights Reserved.
* U.S. Government Users Restricted Rights:
* Use, duplication or disclosure restricted by GSA ADP Schedule Contract with IBM Corp.
*
************************************************************************/

Posted Jan 17, 2013 1:00 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

wow, so you have to go look in the SGA agreement to figure out what's what. Is that document in the tree or somewhere else?

At the very least, this is making it very hard for someone to know what they can and cannot do.

Posted Jan 17, 2013 17:45 UTC (Thu) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]

Definitely not a lawyer, but my read of that is that the files have been released to the Apache Foundation, and not to me. Unless and until the Apache folks put a license grant in themselves, then I don't see a clear chain of permissions from the original authors to myself.

Since Apache pretty clearly knows that they're distributing the files, I assume there's an implicit transfer and inspection grant there, but I see nothing saying that I can modify those files, or transfer them to anyone else.

My understanding of the GPL is that if I write something, and give it to you under GPL terms, then you have most of the rights that I have, but nobody else does, yet. After the transfer, either of us can now grant rights to someone else (albeit somewhat fewer rights, in your case), but we have to actually do it. If neither of us took the explicit step of granting rights, then someone else who intercepted the transmission wouldn't legally be able to incorporate the code in one of their projects. I see no reason why the Apache license would be different; it grants more rights on an authorized transfer, but transfers must still be authorized.

As far as I can see, that's our present status; we're eavesdroppers on the transfer of code from IBM to Apache, and until Apache explicitly says we can use it, it's strictly their code.