Wheeler, David A <[email protected]>:
> ESR:
> > I will now express an opinion: It is *highly unlikely* that a court will
> > ever find any change of open-source license actionable, with one possible
> > exception: changes between reciprocal (GPL-style) and non-reciprocal
> > licenses. But from a court's point of view the difference between (say)
> > BSD and Apache would be very much de minimis non curat lex.
>
> I'll disagree with you on that *specific* point, even though I'm not a lawyer
> either. Many organizations specifically choose the Apache-2.0 license
> because they want the patent statements that are notably *not* in
> BSD-3-Clause and BSD-2-Clause. Given the potential costs of patent
> litigation (which sometimes look more like extortion), and their belief that
> these Apache-2.0 clauses will help address those costs, I think they could
> make a great argument that this is *not* a de minimis difference. In short:
> I would not just s/Apache-2.0/BSD-2-Clause/ on software I didn't have all the
> rights to :-).
OK, there is a possible equity argument there. A thin and doubtful one, but
you have a point.
> However, I think there's value in trying to faithfully capture
> whatever legal text originally came from the originator.
And the design of SPDX is intended to incorporate that text by reference.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
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