At 02:29 PM 1/24/2004, Paul Libbrecht wrote: >Everytime I see an open-source license coming out, I keep having the same >question: what is expected, what is known (and known to fail), in terms of >applicability of this license in other countries than the USA ?
Keep in mind that unlike some projects hosted outside of the USA, the Apache Software Foundation is a Deleware 501c(3) USA corporation, which owns the legal rights to the software it has copyrighted. So as Brian hinted at - if you wish to legally use the software in any country with treaty relations with the US, you continue to be licensed the software (it doesn't become owned by you) according to a legal agreement. That agreement happens to be our license. Without consenting to the license, as a user, you have no legal rights whatsoever to ASF software. To the extent that another government might ignore or abrogate international contract law, well there isn't much we can, or should do about that, and not much point to worrying about language within the license to cover such situations, since I suspect it would be altogether meaningless in that case :) Finally, if we aren't quite as pedantic as the FSF, it's partially because the GNU licenses attempt to enforce more covenants with the users than our license does. Our license primarily protects our ownership, our developers, and the foundation. The GNU licenses attempt more so to protect the code as a living organic entity, which is legally newer ground. Bill --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
