I've reached out to the ASF Board to see if anyone can help or if there
is a resource to answer your questions.
Regards,
KAM
On 3/14/2014 5:06 PM, Tamer Rizk wrote:
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
