Re: Birt licensing problems need help, I cannot solve, scott can you help.

[Scott Gray]

Hi Hans,

I can try to help but I'm not sure I understand, nothing is in question on the Eclipse side, birt is licensed EPL end of story, asking them to change their license would be like someone asking us to change ours. The issue we're facing is compatibility of the ASL with the EPL and we need to resolve it internally. The ASF rules as I understand them (described here: http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-b) is that you cannot include EPL licensed source code in ASL licensed distributions, except for a very narrow range of exceptions. You can however include as many EPL licensed binaries as you like.

Regards
Scott

HotWax Media
http://www.hotwaxmedia.com

On 1/12/2009, at 8:25 PM, Hans Bakker wrote:

Any java files that have been copied and modified from EPL source code (I pointed them out in another email, I don't have them handy) must be removed and replaced with new code without referencing EPL source code to create them (a clean-room implementation). It is also my opinion that we cannot include EPL licensed javascript files (although David disagrees), which means we need to remove the web report viewer. If you want to side with David and keep the report viewer then at the very least the question should be asked on the legal mailing list.

Hi Sott.

can you help?


people at Eclipse and i am trying to solve a licensing problem as a
middleman i do not understand.

Could you please clarify with the people at lice...@eclipse.org and in
particular mike.milinkov...@eclipse.org your concerns?

I am unable to solve the problem you brought up.

Regards,,
Hans

This is the last conversation we had up to now:
We sent the following message:

You brought up the licensing concerns. We tried to talk to the licensing

We would like to ask for approval of the inclusion of the BIRT runtime

with Apache OFBiz because we have concerns in the ofbiz community of
we can include the runtime.

one of our committers found the following license problems:

I checked out the branch and had a look, I see a large number of
javascript and jsp source files that are EPL licensed and I'm
pretty sure that we cannot include them.

Additionally and this one is a little more obscure and I could
quite possibly be wrong but the dteapi.jar file contains a
javax.olap package and the only reference I can find to that
package is jsr-69 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=069).  According
to that page the jsr never reached Final Release and the Proposed
Final Draft was licensed under an evaluation license.  Birt has
written the source code for the interfaces defined by the
specification themselves and licensed it as EPL but I have know
idea whether they were legally allowed to do that.

could you please clarify these concerns?

His answer was:
---------------

to handle licensing questions.

First of all, the usual caveats apply. I am not a lawyer. This is not
legal advice.

But first, I have some questions. When you say “redistribute”, what do
you mean? The EPL allows the redistribution of source code under the

source code can be re-licensed under (say) the Apache license, you are

and distribute EPL-licensed binaries.


Reading between the lines I suspect that the issue you are grappling

guys out.



Mike Milinkovich

Office: +1.613.224.9461 x228

Mobile: +1.613.220.3223

mike.milinkov...@eclipse.org






--
Antwebsystems.com: Quality OFBiz services for competitive rates

Thanks for bringing your enquiry here. The birt-dev list is not equipped EPL; binaries may be re-licensed. When you say “under the EPL license it is allowed to re-distribute small amounts of source like javascript and jsp's when it is unlikely it is changed”, if you are suggesting that EPL mistaken. EPL source code can never be re-licensed. However, as per the Apache Foundation Third Party Licensing Policy, Apache projects can use with is that JavaScript does not really distinguish between source code and binary code. If so, let us know and we will keep trying to help you

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