On Sunday 24 July 2005 11:54, Alex Karasulu wrote: > >>Does the license for JE require company A to have to license JE from > >>SleepyCat? > >> > > > >If they don't provide source code to their product under some kind of > >free software license, the answer seems to be yes. > > > > So all the source. including the commercial versions of the product must > be open? If so we cannot use JE then unfortunately. We cannot require > every company that embeds ApacheDS into their product to have to open > the source to their commercial products.
IANAL, but a similar discussion has recently been up on the legal-discuss@ mailing list. Essentially, at the moment, ASF projects can not use/distribute something that adds additional constraint on the downstream users, than the current Apache license. Hence, the restrictions on LGPL/GPL and other Open/Free licenses that we can depend on. Now, you mentioned elsewhere Subversion, and considering that many of the contributors are Apache folks, and ASF is one of the key promoters of Svn "in real life", doesn't it strike you as "odd" why Subversion wasn't developed within ASF?? Could it be related? In any event, if there are GPL-like options, one choice is to create an external project elsewhere, which contains the constraints and that project "pulls in" the Apache DS, and that would more or less require an additional solution (current?) within the Apache DS project, so it is not 'incomplete'. Any "exception" from Sleepycat, will most likely require a CCLA/ICLA on the codebase in question, to enable the standard downstream usages of Apache codebases. Cheers Niclas
