GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

ZDNet covers an effort to bring the GPL v3 license together with the Apache License. "In a significant change of course, the Free Software Foundation is working to make the upcoming version 3 of the General Public License (GPL) compatible with an alternative, the Apache License. "I think a final change we'll see for the release of GPL 3 will be that compatibility," said Free Software Foundation Executive Director Peter Brown in a panel discussion Tuesday at Sun Microsystems' JavaOne conference here. The Apache License compatibility had been removed as a result of an "11th-hour" decision before release of the third draft of GPL 3."

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GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

Posted May 10, 2007 20:14 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (4 responses)

I beleive he problem with the Apache License from the standpoint of the GPLv3 is section 9 of the Apache license.

It states something like that if you want to do something like charge money for a warrentee or any other sort of liability in regards to Apache licensed software to your have to agree to indemnify the upstream provider also.

GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

Posted May 10, 2007 21:39 UTC (Thu) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link] (3 responses)

Considering that the upstream provider doesn't give any guarantees, that seems a bit redundant.

Section 2 seems incompatible though, as it gives an irrevocable copyright license, while the GPLv3 becomes void under certain conditions, not mentioned in the Apache license.

GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

Posted May 10, 2007 22:12 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (2 responses)

I think that the Apache people feared that if someone offers a warranty, and then someone else puts the software to unsafe use and people get hurt, that the lawyers will sue everyone in sight, despite the loud "NO WARRANTY" on the original software.

GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

Posted May 10, 2007 22:51 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] (1 responses)

The lawyers will sue everybody in sight regardless of any warranties or lack thereof. That's what they do, in hope that the lawsuit will stick to someone, or that one or more of the parties will settle rather than fight it in court.

GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

Posted May 11, 2007 10:31 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

A delightful, civilized variation on the theme of mugging.
"Love thy neighbor as thyself, and thy neighbor's wallet moreso."

I think Ian Murdock is wrong

Posted May 10, 2007 22:09 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (6 responses)

The article quotes Ian Murdock:

Ian Murdock, Sun's chief operating systems officer, said many open-source projects are separate, so the license issue doesn't crop up. "I don't think software licenses matter as much as they used to," he said.

I think this is wrong. Free Java has in the past been crippled by the inability to share code because of license conflicts (GPL vs Apache vs IBM Public License, etc). Because of problems like this, the Mozilla project went to great trouble to get the code relicensed to allow the widest possible use of the Mozilla code.

It also looks self-serving on Ian's part, as Sun is using license incompatibility in an attempt to maintain a competitive edge over Linux with respect to DTrace and ZFS, even though license compatibility would quickly result in many more drivers that work with Solaris.

I think Ian Murdock is wrong

Posted May 10, 2007 22:36 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

I think that the license doesn't matter so much as far as kernels are concerned.

I expect that the differences between the Linux kernel and the Solaris kernel are huge enough that very little in the way of driver code is compatable between both of them and everything would have to be rewritten specificly for the inclusion into Solaris.

The way that licenses matter is they matter as long as are in the way of progress. If they are not in the way of progress then they don't matter. One of the important issues is to avoid licensing proliferation.. if everything is compatable with the GPLv3 and the GPLv3 is the most restrictive license you will find in open source software then it forms a lowest common denominator.

It's when you have dozens of conflicting and obnoxious licenses is when things start to suck and licenses start to matter. Licenses and legal BS is a _barrier_ to progress, not a facilitator. That is one of the major reasons why propriatory software sucks..

Once the gplv3-is-as-bad-as-it-gets-and-everything-is-compatable happens then realy the licenses are actually fairly irrelevent... Which is GREAT. Licensing bullshit frequently holds back progress and causes a lot of developer division and delays. Imagine a world were Debian-legal is irrelevent because all software is Free?

I don't think it's like that right now, though. Unfortunately licenses do matter, but I'd like to think that they matter less then they used to.

Going with the CDDL didn't help any. Sun made it worse.

Going with GPLv2 for the Java stuff and hopefully GPLv3 for Solaris stuff should make things a lot better for everybody...

Copyright and license

Posted May 11, 2007 3:37 UTC (Fri) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link] (1 responses)

> Licenses and legal BS is a _barrier_ to progress, not a facilitator.

Careful. The only thing that licenses ever ever (legally) do is *grant* freedoms to the recipient; it's current restrictive copyright defaults that make things bad. The only reason proprietary licenses seem obnoxious is that they go to great lengths to release the monopoly of copyright as little as possible, while still making the work saleable.

Free software licenses currently rest on the same system of copyright, but grant far more freedom, bringing the user closer to the natural state of information freedom. Make no mistake: the license of free software is *much better* than no license at all.

Copyright and license

Posted May 11, 2007 8:53 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

your absolutely right.

I am more thinking about people arguing over this vs that license. Most of the time it's pointless stuff.

Idealy we'd simply not have to deal with this, people would automaticly give money to the best programmers, and all that fun stuff.

Of course that is not true because of greedy a-holes will take advantage of poeple and screw them over if given the opportunity.

The classic illistration of this is the Unix vs BSD lawsuites. BSD contributed a lot back to Unix, stuff that made it a commercial success. But as soon as BSD was seen as s threat they stomped all over it and completely screwed over the programmers who freely gave away their time and code.

Stuff like that is why GPL is a nessicary evil.

I think Joe Buck is wrong

Posted May 11, 2007 2:28 UTC (Fri) by akumria (guest, #7773) [Link] (2 responses)

It also looks self-serving on Ian's part, as Sun is using license incompatibility in an attempt to maintain a competitive edge over Linux with respect to DTrace and ZFS, even though license compatibility would quickly result in many more drivers that work with Solaris.

Oddly enough, here the GPLv2 source code to ZFS - written by Sun no less. ZFS GPLv2

I think Joe Buck is wrong

Posted May 11, 2007 8:20 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

this is only a portion of ZFS, enough for grub to access a ZFS partition in read-only mode. there's quite a bit more that would be needed to be able to mount things read-write

in addition there's the question of patents. as I understand it sun has at least strongly implied that parts of zfs are covered by patents, further limiting it's use.

I think Joe Buck is wrong

Posted May 11, 2007 12:20 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

The CDDL has patent indemnification saying basicly that if you this code in your product that Sun won't sue you for using it.

Ya this is a strange thing to say, but it's needed. If I had software code that I released under the MIT license which was patented and you used it I could sue you, more or less. This is how the MIT licensed code for MP3s from Fluendo works, you can look at the code and muck around with it, but in order to get the license to the patents you have to obtain the codec from them or one of their contract fellows.

Since the CDDL is incompatable with the GPLv2 no Sun code can make into the kernel and thusly Sun has not granted you the ability to use their patented concepts.

PLus the concept of ZFS kinda goes against the Linux kernel developer's sensibilities. Linux developers tend to like the layered approach with the MD raid features, file system, VFS, LVM, etc etc. instead of the ZFS approach which lumps it all into one big hunk. Sun, of course, claims that by refactoring the traditional concepts of storage (raid, vfs/fs, logical volumes) they are able to remove much redundant and mostly needless complexity.

GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

Posted May 11, 2007 0:25 UTC (Fri) by glutinous (guest, #25595) [Link]

It's great to see how GPL v3 has progressed since its initial inception. It seems like the people at the FSF had to turn a lot of skeptics around to get the license at the level of acceptability it is today. They should be very proud of all that they have managed to achieved. I wish for all the best with the final release of GPLv3! I certainly will be using it for my own projects.

-Steven

GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

Posted May 11, 2007 5:53 UTC (Fri) by bluefoxicy (guest, #25366) [Link] (8 responses)

Does anyone want the GPL3 besides Stallman?

GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

Posted May 11, 2007 8:40 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Me, for example. Actually right now I think "v2 or later" is best choice. GPLv3 makes life for "bad guys" really hard but it also makes life for "good guys" harder (nothing is free). The mere fact that free software can go GPLv3 way will stop some bad guys - and may be that'll be the end of story, but I think pretty soon we'll need GPLv3 in fight for freedom.

It's like IPv4 vs IPv6: IPv4 works fine today, but there are a lot of problems - and IPv6 can easily resolve these problems, but it'll introduce new ones so we should not switch right away.

GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

Posted May 11, 2007 12:45 UTC (Fri) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link]

Yes.

Is this a rhetorical question?

GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

Posted May 11, 2007 15:00 UTC (Fri) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes. Once the final license is released I'll almost certainly be using a GPLv3 or later license wherever possible for code I create. I'm impressed by the effort the FSF has made to get this right and I don't want my work used to lock people out of their own devices. It's that simple.

GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

Posted May 11, 2007 17:13 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (3 responses)

If that were that simple... but actually some GPLv3 clauses allow people to integrate your code in a software whose license has some more conditions than the GPLv3. In particular

7. Additional Terms.
13. Use with the Affero General Public License.
and eventually the an "Apache compatibility" clause

So you could end up with a fork of your code that you cannot reintegrate
in your own version without adding these restrictions.

The GPLv2 did not have this flaw.

You see a flaw, I see an advantage

Posted May 11, 2007 18:45 UTC (Fri) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] (2 responses)

I probably wouldn't sue someone who linked my GPLv2 code with incompatibly licensed free software in any case. I use the GPL to defend software I write from proprietary use, not to shut out other free software developers who make different license choices. Compatability with other licenses is an advantage in my view.

You see a flaw, I see an advantage

Posted May 11, 2007 19:34 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

But the person that made the fork might sue you if you does not
obey the additional conditions, so you are no better off if you
try to reintegrate your code. And it also depends whether you consider
the Affero public license a Free Software license.

Unrealistic Problem

Posted May 12, 2007 0:37 UTC (Sat) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link]

In my experience people who want to improve my code are happy to contribute under the same license, even if they wouldn't choose that for their own independent work (just as I am when contributing to projects under BSD style licenses). Combining code with something under a different license is usually done to integrate with an established project and I would prefer to permit that. I don't believe the situation you describe is realistic, but if it happens I can live with it.

GPL likely to regain Apache compatibility (ZDNet)

Posted May 14, 2007 19:04 UTC (Mon) by robilad (guest, #27163) [Link]

Yes. In part because of the Apache compatibility, actually.