Hi, Sun has announced at JavaOne that they will donate code for a Servlet and JSP engine to the Apache Foundation. This code will then be licensed under the Apache license. This is the Jakarta project <http://jakarta.apache.org>. They don't have the code yet.
There is a lot of code dealing with Servlets and JSP that is licenced under the GPL. The Apache license and GPL don't seem to be compatible. I asked Richard Stallman about it (actually that was more then two weeks ago, but since then there were some other priorities in my live that were more important than software licenses) and he confirmed that conditions 3, 4 and 5 could be seen as added restrictions. (Condition 3 is the advertising clause, conditions 4 and 5 say you have to get permission to use the Apache name.) I was going to ask the the Jakarta people to consider changing the license to a more unrestricted license by dropping those three clauses, so also projects using code under the GPL could benefit from the work that Sun donated. And to add the suggestion (from Richard Stallman) that they trademark the name Apache and have a seperate trademark license in which they could (or could not) grant rights to the Apache name. Since I am running Debian I wondered how Debian had solved these issues since they refer to the binary as apache although it is a derived product (the apache_1.3.3-7.diff.gz is 154K). Did Debian get special permission to call use the Apache name? And in the /usr/doc/apache/copyright file I noticed that the modifications for Debian are released under the terms of the GPL. How does this work when the Apache license doesn't seem to be compatible with the GPL? Any clarification of these issues would be greatly appreciated. And since you have probably more experience with approaching people to change their licenses any tips are also very welcome. Thanks, Mark
