20041021 Thursday October 21, 2004

AppFuse's License Someone sent me an e-mail today and made me aware that the Commons Attribute License that AppFuse uses only applies to documents and such:

"Collective Work" means a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology or encyclopedia, in which the Work in its entirety in unmodified form, along with a number of other contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole.

Because of this, I'm thinking of switching to use an Apache 2 License. This seems to be the friendliest license for open source. Basically, all I want to do is try to get folks that use AppFuse to give it some credit. Which really means they're marketing it in a sense. More marketing -> more users -> (hopefully) I'll stay employed and the product will get better.

The only pain I can see about licensing with an Apache License is they want you to add a short copyright notice at the top. But I'm not really handing the copyright of AppFuse over to ASF, am I? Do I have to add this copyright to all my .java files? I know that Spring does this, but... ugh ... seems rather unnecessary. Posted in Java at Oct 21 2004, 10:54:08 AM MDT 11 Comments

Comments:

License is tricky. You own it and can give it to whom you want to, again and again in any way you see fit. So a copyright to ASF, you still own it. Many people don't know that. You would have to transfer the ownership, which is not real easy.

.V

Posted by Vic on October 21, 2004 at 11:13 AM MDT #

If you look at this opensource.org page, you will see that the proper way to use this license on your own work is to replace the Apache name with your own in the copyright block that is added to each file. Another option is the BSD License, but that really has almost no restrictions at all so it may or may not be what you want.

Posted by Nathan Anderson on October 21, 2004 at 12:53 PM MDT #

The bottom of the Apache License 2.0 tells you what to do as well -- as Nathan points out, the copyright line should have the name of whoever owns the copyright there.

<pre style="margin-left: 30px"> APPENDIX: How to apply the Apache License to your work. To apply the Apache License to your work, attach the following boilerplate notice, with the fields enclosed by brackets "[]" replaced with your own identifying information. (Don't include the brackets!) The text should be enclosed in the appropriate comment syntax for the file format. We also recommend that a file or class name and description of purpose be included on the same "printed page" as the copyright notice for easier identification within third-party archives. Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner] Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Craig

Posted by Craig McClanahan on October 21, 2004 at 12:58 PM MDT #

If you are going to add a short copyright notice at the top, I would suggest using jalopy http://jalopy.sourceforge.net/ there is an eclipse plugin for it, if that's what you use.
When our legal department where I work found out that we where not putting a copy statement at the top of our code, they had a fit. So we used it to add the statement and format our code in one pass. actually made life kinda easy. couldn't imagine going through and hand editing all our classes.

Posted by Paul Lofte on October 21, 2004 at 07:55 PM MDT #

Matt, let me emphasize Craig's point. using the Apache Software License and assigning copyright to the ASF are two completely separate things. You can simply use the license and replace "Apache Software Foundation" with your name.

Posted by Stefan Bodewig on October 22, 2004 at 08:19 AM MDT #

BSD is just as business friendly, and the license is approved by the FSF (which IIRC Apache 2.0 isn't, and Apache 1.0 never was)

Posted by Sam Newman on October 22, 2004 at 08:34 AM MDT #

FWIW, Marc Fleury of JBoss feels that the LGPL license is the most business friendly and BSD is a rip-off. I have no idea personally, so I refer to those who know much more than I do about this stuff. http://jboss.org/jbossBlog/blog/mfleury/

Posted by Kevin Williams on October 22, 2004 at 10:49 PM MDT #

BSD, Apache 1 and 2 allow you to take the code, change it, then sell it - if you change the LGPL code, you have to make it freely available. Doesn't sound as business friendly to me :-)

Posted by Sam Newman on October 23, 2004 at 06:15 AM MDT #

It appears that Marc Fleury's argument is that the original BSD license and others like it make it too easy to take other's work and pass it off as your own. If it's my work, I don't want others passing it off as their own without giving me due credit. Linux, MySQL, and JBoss all have very profitable businesses while making the source freely available. If it were easier for someone to take the code and pass it off as their own, those businesses would be in trouble.

What made me go with LGPL is not only Marc Fleury's arguments but the fact that GPL-incompatible licenses ( see FSF site ) mostly allow use with GPL & LGPL, so my software will have less restricted use under LGPL than if I chose BSD or Apache2. In the past, I've used dual licenses, such as Mozilla 1.1 & LGPL, which is allowed by the FSF. Perhaps the most deciding factor should be your target audience. If your software needs to be tightly linked to Apache software, then the Apache2 license might be your best bet.

Posted by Kevin Williams on October 23, 2004 at 07:48 AM MDT #

Sam Newman, The GPL license is the one tha obligates you to make the work based on a free software freely available too, the LGPL is Less restrictive, you don't need to release your changed code, that is why it is generally used for libraries. So, now it sounds business friendly again :-)

Posted by Gutemberg Vieira on October 29, 2004 at 09:06 AM MDT #

Fleury's arguments about the ASL/BSD licenses are rubbish. The Apache (BSD) license is the most successful license because it is the most accomodating for all scenarios - commercial or open source.

Posted by Rory Winston on November 09, 2004 at 08:31 AM MST #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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