Is the some reason to use CC0 rather than Apache?
Ron
On 22/05/2015 5:08 PM, David E. Jones wrote:
On 22 May 2015, at 11:29, David E. Jones <d...@me.com> wrote:
On 21 May 2015, at 06:28, Ron Wheeler <rwhee...@artifact-software.com> wrote:
I am not a lawyer and Apache's legal team should be approached before we embark
on a plan that involves the use of a third party tool that does not have an
Apache license or a license that is known to be compatible with inclusion in an
Apache product.
At the moment, from my reading of the source that Jacques found, it would not
be possible to release a Moqui-based framework under an Apache license.
Moqui is in a no-man's land where your right to use it depends on what country
you are in and unless you are the owner, it is not clear how your can
redistribute it internationally.
If we write a layer to go between Moqui and the OFBiz components to replace the
framework, users would have to decide if they could legally run Moqui and would
have to go get it on their own and install it separately.
For the moment my preference would be to focus on getting the current framework into a
separate sub-project, clean up the current dependency issues, document it and release it
as a separate deliverable with an Apache license and its own roadmap and
"marketing" plan.
That is based on assertions from knowledgeable people in this project that it
is valuable on its own for others who want to develop other sorts of business
applications.
Even if Moqui is a better framework technically, the Apache license would make
the Apache OFBiz Framework a more desirable product for an organization wanting
to invest in creating an application.
This is a straw man argument, doesn’t seem to apply to actual public domain
“licensing” at all.
Software in the public domain has far fewer restrictions than the Apache 2
license, simpler legal terms, and exists under a well established legal
framework, one that has been around for centuries and remains largely unchanged
by the continually shifting sands of copyright law around the world. It is true
that some jurisdictions have limits on which authors rights can be disclaimed,
licensed, or transferred but that applies to ALL copyright licenses including
open source and commercial ones, and to clarify for different jurisdictions is
handled by specific wording in headers and LICENSE files, such as:
https://github.com/moqui/moqui/blob/master/LICENSE.md
The best source for general information about the concept and legal specifics
is:
http://unlicense.org
I appreciate your comments Ron. I looked into this a little more and found that
there appear to be certain jurisdictions (though I can’t find any references
about which…) don’t recognize public domain status and for this reason the CC0
public domain attribution has alternate terms for such jurisdictions (making it
an improvement over the unlicense.org legal wording):
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
I’ve updated the Moqui/etc files to use CC0 instead of unlicense.org.
This should clarify any questions or doubts about the licensing and public
domain status of Moqui/etc. On the topic of legal clearance (in this case
copyright waiver, somewhat like the Apache CLA) I’m also putting in place
AUTHORS files signed by git commit. There are only a small number of
contributors other than me, but this will help establish a more firm legal
position.
-David
--
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: rwhee...@artifact-software.com
skype: ronaldmwheeler
phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102
