The Goldfish Chronicles

Many sourceforge, and other open source, projects will state themselves as having an ‘Apache licence’. Sourceforge even provides a nice easy way to say this.

This is very nice of them. Although Apache have their own servers etc, it’s sometimes nice to work on a project over at Sourceforge and treat it as a sandbox etc.

This isn’t always the case. A lot of people select ‘Apache licence’ just because they like Apache’s licence and wish they had their own. However they ought to read the licence. Anyone using their code has to:

include the following acknowlegement:
* “This product includes software developed by the
* Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/).”

It is also said that:

* This software consists of voluntary contributions made by many
* individuals on behalf of the Apache Software Foundation.

So what does this mean? Well, all these projects with ‘Apache licences’ are in fact owned by Apache. This is bad legally for Apache as if someone chooses to sue someone over the licence, they should legally goto Apache. Of course, Apache can just claim that the other person illegally attributed the code to them and join the original company in sueing the original author of that work.

So the solution seems to be that Apache should emulate SCO and start seizing work that they own that has not until now been stored in the Apache infrastructure. [I’ve no idea how much is out there actually, sourceforge don’t have such a search function on their site]. While browsing I did notice one interesting thing, a dual-GPL/Apache licenced product. I’m pretty sure this is impossible as Apache don’t release GPL code and by licencing to them you’re giving Apache the product.

Too lazy to wait for April 1st

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2003 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.