Hi Andrew, If you have specific questions, you might be better served by asking on legal-disc...@apache.org
That said, I can try to give you the 10,000 foot view. Full disclaimer: IANAL. You can choose to apply the Apache Licence (AL) to your code without submitting it to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). However, if you are submitting your code to the ASF, it must be ALv2 (v2 is the current version). Kind of a square is a rectangle, but not all rectangles are squares thing. An example of AL projects outside of the ASF includes jcommander, hosted on GitHub, which Accumulo uses. If you license your code as AL, then anybody else is free to take your code, modify it, and either give away their changes, sell them, etc. Their additions can be AL as well, or can be some other licence. If you licence your code GPLv3, then anybody else is free to take your code, modify it, and give away their changes as long as those changes are also GPLv3. This is colloquially known as a viral licence. ASF projects cannot use GPL code - a familiar example might be how Hadoop (and Accumulo) does not ship with the LZO extensions, they must be downloaded separately. ASF projects can use some other licenses such as MIT and BSD as dependencies - apologies, I don't have the full list as I'm on my phone right now. Search for ASF Compatible Licenses or something like that. Another caveat that you might want to consider, since I noticed that you sent this mail from what looks like a work account, is what your companies' policies are, if they are a stakeholder in the code. They might have no input into this, or you might want to discuss the options with your internal legal staff; I can't pretend to know your current arrangement. tl;dr - Use AL if you want the simplest path to adoption in the Accumulo code base, use GPL if you would like to make sure that nobody can make proprietary changes and sell them. Mike On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 6:18 PM, Andrew Wells <awe...@clearedgeit.com> wrote: > I have been working on a tool, that I am calling Q4A. > > However, due to my upcoming wedding, I have not had much time to work on > it. I was hoping during the Accumulo Hackathon this week, I could actually > get some more elbow grease into it and maybe get some help working on it. > > Currently, I need someone to give me some advice on Licensing for the tool. > So if anyone would like to give some advice that would be great. > > I was looking at the ASF license but it not sure how it works for outside > the ASF and the GPL3 which is said to be compatible with the ASF license. > > -- > *Andrew George Wells* > *Software Engineer* > *awe...@clearedgeit.com <awe...@clearedgeit.com>* >
