All rights reserved [LWN.net]

All rights reserved

Posted Jan 17, 2013 17:33 UTC (Thu) by mjw (subscriber, #16740)
In reply to: All rights reserved by mjg59
Parent article: A discordant symphony

Yes, the ASF says that only the company that contributed the files originally can replace the license headers of the files granted and IBM seems uninterested to do that unless a specific file is incorporated in an official release. They don't want to do that for the contribution as a whole.

For the original files contributed by Oracle this took a very long time to sort through all the files by an Oracle employee to double check Oracle really had the right to do that for all the files mentioned in the software grant and/or had to ask to have additional files added to the grant. Only IBM knows how much work that really would be for the symphony files.

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Posted Jan 17, 2013 17:46 UTC (Thu) by rcweir (subscriber, #48888) [Link]

>only the company that contributed the files originally can replace the license headers of the files granted

That is a policy statement, not a legal statement.

This is an important distinction. For example, an Apache project can not release software containing GPL code. That is a policy requirement. But legally, anyone else, outside of Apache, is free to mix ALv2 and GPL code together, if that suits their needs. The licenses are compatible in that way.

You should not confuse the stricter policy requirements incumbent on an Apache project versus what the license permits any random person to do.

-Rob

Posted Jan 17, 2013 17:52 UTC (Thu) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]

But the license has been granted from IBM to Apache, not to us. Unless and until Apache explicitly adds a specific grant of license to us, we're just eavesdroppers, with no rights to modify or distribute.

It doesn't have to be in every header; a simple document, just like IBM's, would be enough. Something along the lines of "This code is released to the general public under the terms of the Apache License v2", or whatever language you guys actually like to use.

Unless and until you explicitly release the code, it sure looks to me that IBM has given it to you, but not to us. I see no clear chain of permissions that would allow me to change and share that code freely.

Posted Jan 17, 2013 17:55 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

"But the license has been granted from IBM to Apache, not to us."

Well, kind of. Part of that license is a grant of permissions to anyone to whom that software is distributed by Apache. The question is what the precise meaning of "distribute" is in this case - we've already had an assertion that the code in question hasn't been published by Apache. In any case, Rob's right that this isn't the right venue for an authoritative answer, and so I've mailed the appropriate mailing list.