Justin Wells wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 01:21:29PM -0800, John McNally wrote:
>
> > It seems you are upset that the ASF has some flexibility in their
> > license, but not enough for your satisfaction.
>
> No, in their license approval process. The license is fine, it's
> a license. I have no big issue with it.
>
I think that says quite a bit. It is my understanding that the ASF will
accept any license that contains <= the restrictions imposed by the
APL. It seems you were attempting to add some additional restrictions
in an attempt to emulate the GPL style license as well. This would
appear to be an impossible task as an FSF compatible license has to have
the restriction that the source code be distributed with all binaries
and this would be considered an additional restriction which would make
such a license unusable by Apache projects.
I applaud your desire to reconcile the philosophies, but I really don't
see any way you could have succeeded.
You describe the ASF members as fanatical and uncompromising. The ASF
has many members, anyone of which I think could veto a proposal to relax
their standards. You may be misinterpreting the attitude of some of the
members which you contacted. They probably realize the practical
impossibility of accommodating your request. I am sure there must be at
least one member of the ASF that feels the branding restrictions imposed
by the APL were compromise enough. I am sure these issues were
discussed at length and many feel the compromise that was reached is
adequate and they prefer to spend their time elsewhere. (This attitude
might even be shared by you, if not before starting this process, maybe
now.)
>
> Actually I found the FSF to be much more flexible than the ASF.
> They're helpful people with a clearly expressed philosophy who
> will patiently work through with you how and where your license
> may differ from their views. Assuming you correct your license
> to be compatible with that clearly expressed philosophy they
> are happy to declare it a free software license, or if you go
> far enough, a GPL compatible license. The process is informal,
> friendly, and fun.
I am unconvinced of this great flexibility in the FSF standards. You
must require source code to accompany any binaries. I should not go
further here though, maybe I am wrong in my assumption. If you follow
ASF philosophy (which maybe isn't so clearly expressed), they will
declare your license APL compatible. Is the ASF in the business of
declaring licenses "free" or "opensource"? I think there is such an
organization but I do not know that it is or is related to the ASF.
>
> The ASF on the other hand is a quagmire. Near as I can tell a
> bunch of religious nuts hell bent on proving to the rest of the
> world that anything that isn't ASF is wrong, and anyone who does
> anything in any way different "doesn't get it". An altogether
> unpleasant lot of people who are unable to clearly express
> their philosophy and unable to work with other groups.
>
> The process of trying to determine what a license would have to
> say to be consistent with the ASF's philosophy proved to be
> extremely frustrating. The people I had to deal with were
> stubborn, and generally rude. Altogether an unpleasant
> experience which left me questining whether there really
> is such thing as an Apache community--or whether it's just a
> bunch of egotistical jerks trying to increase their noospheres
> at everyone else's expense.
>
> Sorry to be blunt, but that's how I found the process.
Again maybe it isn't clearly stated, but I think the basic philosophy is
any license which contains a subset of the restrictions imposed by the
APL is compatible.
>
> The FSF has clearly expressed their philosophy on their website
> and numerous other places. You may not agree with it--
I am not in complete disagreement with the FSF's goals. I just lean
towards liking legal documents to be fairly simple to read and abide
by. RMS seems to be well on the way to world domination and when he
achieves it I will be happy to join up :) I would not have a problem
working a FSF copyrighted GPL software project now for that matter. The
primary thing I dislike is assigning copyright to some individual who
may then use my contribution to personally benefit themselves when they
will not give me the same rights.
>
> You people (generalizing to the whole ASF "community") have a
> whole hell of a lot to learn about collaborating with the rest
> of the opensource community.
I would say many of us just dislike the requirements of the GPL, when
applied to software that is primarily used to build other software. We
need to make a living and enjoy working in an open collaborative
environment. Using and contributing to software with APL/BSD licenses
makes it easy to accomplish both. WebMacro is a great idea and the
Turbine project was in need of a template engine. I was somewhat
opposed to its adoption as I saw the GPL as a major obstacle to its
use. Jon Stevens saw it as the best solution and from what I gather had
a reasonable expectation that you were willing to come up with a license
we could use. He told people who were building projects using the
combination that the license problem would not be an issue; some people
took him at his word and would have been burned. if he did not deliver.
The ease with which you finally changed your license after another
project threatened to eliminate the need for WebMacro leads me to
question what was so difficult about the whole process prior to this
development. There is nothing wrong with Jon requesting clarification
from the FSF regarding using software that is dual licensed. One of the
reasons the ASF is uncompromising in its licensing position is its
desire to stay clear of legal problems. I am glad to hear RMS is as
compromising as you say, but I am sure he is more compromising when he
is contacted prior to distributing software that has a GPL version than
after fact. And the ASF would probably prefer to avoid a more public or
high profile fight than this issue has already caused. And this feeling
is probably shared by most of us in the OSS community.
John McNally
>
> Justin
>
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