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Apache License Updated to 2.0
Roy_Fielding writes "The Apache Software Foundation has approved an update
to the open source
Apache License (Version 2.0) that will be mandated across all Apache projects
starting on March 1st.
I have been working on variations of this
license for the past three years, trying to
balance the many different goals of the revision. That includes making the license easier for
non-ASF projects to use, improving compatibility
with GPL-based software, allowing the license
to be included by reference instead of listed
in every file, clarifying the license on contributions, and requiring a patent license on contributions that necessarily
infringe a contributor's own patents.
The result is a license that is compatible with other open source
licenses, such as the GPL, and yet still remains true to the original
goals of the Apache Group and supportive of collaborative development
across both nonprofit and commercial organizations." While it has yet to become OSI-certified, it will probably will be so Real Soon Now, and in the meantime it's fun to compare licenses.
Not exactly. You don't lose your copyright license to Apache (which is what the Apache license mainly is), you lose the patent licenses. Picture this: suppose five companies contributed to Apache and thus granted you licenses to use their appropriate patents. You then sue one of these companies for patent infringement. The new Apache license means that in this case you may still redistribute Apache (since you still have a copyright license), but you've opened yourself up to being sued by any of the five companies for patent infringement, as you no longer have a license to those patents.
So now you see why this is not the case. You may still use it, but you now run the risk of being sued over patents.
IANAL, of course.
I thought it was clear but I'll explain again.
My company writes software that we like to distribute as free software. I started doing this in 1995, and the tools and packages I make are quite widely ported and used. When I started my company our policy was that anything we could not rapidly turn into a product we would release as open source. Software that is not used dies, we figured.
Our license was a BSD-style license that basically allowed people to do what they liked with the software.
In 2001 I noticed that some commercial products incorporating our code were being sold. Very good, I thought, it's nice to see our work being used. But when I asked them to provide us with some of the extensions and patches they'd made, the answer was "no, this is not possible". Now, seeing people use the results of years of work then refusing to contribute anything back rather annoyed me. My company was selling support licenses for our products, and these were in fact our competitors.
The solution came in the form of an article by Richard Stallman which explained why using the LGPL was in fact giving help to closed-source developers who directly or indirectly compete with open source developers.
We decided to switch to the GPL, and in 2002 we moved all our OSS products to this license. At the same time, we had a number of commercial licensees. To give these groups a non-viral package, we developed a dual licensing model.
Since the code is ours, it's our right to license it to specific users under specific terms. The GPL is not incompatible with commercial licenses, so long as it's the copyright holder who decides what license to apply in each case.
To summarize: for OSS developers we use the GPL, for commercial developers we use a commercial license.
It works well. We've had no GPL violations, and enough commercial licensees to make it worth developing our core packages further.
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