> The ASF develops and distributes code licensed under the ASL. An ASF > project can depend on software written on other licenses, but distributing > or developing software under different licenses is somewhere between > atypical and prohibited. I think any exception would have to be granted by > the board.
I've never seen anything when reading through the ASF docs on licensing that would indicate including external dependencies is 'somewhere between atypical and prohibited'. Links [1-3] that describe the general intent and some specifics on license compatibility never seem to mention in either direction what can or can not be included in SVN. Links [4-5] are both discussions on legal-discuss about including non-ASL compatible code in SVN to which the answer is somewhat hazy which I find quite surprising if including ASL-compatible code is atypical or prohibited. And to keeping these specifics in the distribution, each dependency is under a Class A compatible license which by reading [2] and [3] to lead me to believe that they are all completely kosher. Quoting from [6] which was the thread you started on incubator-general@ Niclas Hedhman wrote in response to you: > 2. Speaking from a legal perspective, there is nothing "at Apache" that > prevents people for doing source code copy, in small or large (a.k.a forks), > PROVIDED that the license allows it. I saw you mentioning BSD (modified I > hope) and MIT X, and those licenses require attribution and few other > things, so if that is done, there is no legal contention here. Now you said > that Apache doesn't fork... well the reason behind that (I think) is that we > are all lazy, it takes a lot of energy to maintain forks. And we don't do it > to compete with the original project, out of courtesy... is that your > complaint? which would also lend to my interpretation so far that there is nothing wrong with including the dependencies. But perhaps I've missed something. If you could provide me a link to an email discussion or something in the legal documentation that would help me understand what the underlying issues are I would be most grateful. [1] http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html [2] http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html [3] http://www.apache.org/legal/ramblings.html [4] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-legal-discuss/200904.mbox/%[email protected]%3e [5] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-legal-discuss/200812.mbox/%[email protected]%3e [6] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/200908.mbox/%[email protected]%3e HTH, Paul J. Davis
