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Re: What license should I use when including code from subversion?

From: Brian Behlendorf <brian_at_collab.net>
Date: 2004-03-01 19:00:58 CET

On Sun, 29 Feb 2004, Ben Reser wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 03:50:59PM -0800, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> > The ASF never considered the 1.1 license to be ASF-incompatible in
> > practice. That is to say, no one has ever been sued by the ASF, or even
> > asked to stop, for including Apache software inside a GPL release.
> >
> > Likewise, CollabNet will never sue someone for doing the same thing. Our
> > intent for the license is to give *everyone* the ability to include it in
> > their works, with minimal notification and liability exemption required.
>
> I realize this hasn't been an issue in practice. But I'd be more
> concerned about the reverse. Some GPL author complaining when his work
> was combined with subversion licensed code.

That absolutely, positively is not possible to do. It's not a goal of the
Subversion license to allow GPL code to be covered by it - that would not
be possible with any license other than the GPL. "Compatibility with the
GPL" entirely means software under a license that allows it to be combined
with other GPL software, the whole of which is distributed under the GPL.

> I think the jury is still out on the FSF's position on the AL-2.0.

The "jury", being Roy Fielding and Eben Moglen, are still discussing the
issue privately. Eben's position, and is seems RMS's as well, is that the
patent provisions (the only sticking point) are not a bad thing, and that
our language will (almost certainly) be compatible with whatever is in the
next version of the GPL. The question is whether it's compatible today,
and rests on a fairly complicated understanding of patent law and a guess,
really, at how courts will interpret some of the language.

> Additionally, unlike the ASF, you are a commercial business. The
> ownership of your copyright might be sold. Your intentions go a long
> way. But only as long as you still own the copyrights. If your
> business goes under and the copyrights are liquidated who knows what the
> new buyer will do with them.

Of course; but the copyright license can not be revoked. Further, if say
Microsoft buys CollabNet and decides to sue people who've included
Subversion code into a GPL'd program, they'd have to account for our
past messages about the interpretation of the license as being
GPL-compatible, and the court would look at that and likely throw their
suit out.

> Your statements here do go a long way to creating an estoppel defense
> for anyone sued by your successors, if any, for such a claim.

Precisely.

Note that there's no particular reason, as far as CollabNet is concerned,
to be the copyright holder on the code. We have always thought that in
the long run, this code base (and perhaps others at tigris.org) would be
transferred to some sort of non-profit entity that would defend it when
necessary and act as a shield for the developers - just like the ASF.
We've not pushed this because there's been lots of other things to worry
about; and to do this right we'd want to start collecting Contributor
Licensing Agreements like the ASF does, and the question of how such an
organization is structured would need to be figured out... etc. But we'd
like to do this at some point, and probably should do this soon.

> While I make these comments, I'll add that I'm not overly concerned with
> the license. If I was I wouldn't have contributed to the project.
> Thanks for your response on this issue. It goes a long way towards
> dispelling the fears that some might have about this license.

Cool :)

> Thanks for licensing your work under an open source license! :)

Trust me when I say, it's our distinct pleasure to be able to.

        Brian

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Received on Mon Mar 1 19:00:17 2004

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