It seems like it does not make a difference since the license enables
the addition of copyright statements to modifications and the author may
use additional or different license terms for derivative works.
Further, the agreement calls for "grant to the Foundation and to
recipients of software distributed by the Foundation a perpetual,
worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright
license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display,
publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such
derivative works." which is what was intended.
The section that I am worried about is "If any entity institutes patent
litigation against You or any other entity (including a cross-claim or
counterclaim in a lawsuit) *alleging* that your Contribution, or the
Work to which you have contributed, constitutes direct or contributory
patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to that entity
under this Agreement for that Contribution or Work shall terminate as of
the date such litigation is filed." and the impact of this text on some
of my other work.
In the case that I can sandbox the project within the CLA to ensure that
other entities cannot maliciously leverage the contribution and the text
of the CLA in adversity to other work, it would be okay, however I am
not sure that is possible as there is too much overlap in software
today. Perhaps I can assign the work to someone else who would agree to
the contributor agreement, so that the project is beneficial to the
community and everyone is happy? If that works, let me speak to an
attorney and get back to you. Otherwise feel free to suggest a way
around the exposure, or the best way to ensure that the most benefit
inures to your project, such as leaving it under the ASF 2.0, another
permissive license, or through the involvement of other developers.
Kevin A. McGrail wrote:
On 3/14/2014 3:37 PM, Tamer Rizk wrote:
Note on previous message by "the ability to take the code in an independent
direction" I mean independently, such that SA is still free to do whatever it
wants.
Isn't that just a standard code-fork which the ASF 2.0 License permits without
issue other than you have to attribute that ASF code is included?
https://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#WhatDoesItMEAN does the best
job of answering the question.
Tamer Rizk wrote:
I was joking too. In any case, legalese aside, I think attribution is
both ethical and okay on either side of the table, the divergence of
opinion seems to be with the copyright. Besides attribution, what I am
trying to achieve with the copyright is the ability to take the code in
an independent direction as a copyright holder five years in the future
if SA hypothetically decides to be purchased by Oracle or what have you.
I am not sure if a dual copyright (which based on my limited
understanding is the same thing as a perpetual, transferable,
non-revocable license) is possible, but if so, I would be more than
happy to assign.
Kevin A. McGrail wrote:
On 3/14/2014 2:59 PM, Tamer Rizk wrote:
Sure, no problem, I would be happy to contribute to helping the
ongoing effort to solve the global spam problem and as a small token
of appreciation for the SpamAssassin project and the Apache Foundation
in general. Can you point me to the appropriate CLA so that I may
verify that there are no conflicts with anything else that I am
working on?
:-)
See https://www.apache.org/licenses/#clas
In so much as there is no conflict, SpamAssassin is more than welcome
to an irrevocable, perpetual and transferable license to use and make
changes to the contribution in any manner. I would retain copyright
attribution within the source and documentation of the package and its
derivatives somewhat akin to a leaner version of Sir Bacon sans lines
2-5.
I don't think Sir Bacon actually has any copyright on the code,
actually. I think Alex was joking about the dead guy and BACN
If code has a copyright or author other than ASF, ASF policy is it is
removed - https://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html has more on the
issue. So you can give us permission to remove that information but
otherwise, you really aren't transferring the contribution to the ASF.
regards,
KAM
--
*Kevin A. McGrail*
President
Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation
3927 Old Lee Highway, Suite 102-C
Fairfax, VA 22030-2422
http://www.pccc.com/
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