I have done some more reading on Apache 3rd party licensing and after some careful reading, I believe that Hans' use of BIRT is acceptably within the policy. The latest copy of the policy is available at "http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html"; with the key area being "Category B: Reciprocal Licenses". The important phrase in that section that we seem to have missed is the reference to code "not directly consumed at runtime in source <http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html#define-source> form". To me, that phrase says that source which is "consumed at runtime in source form" is not required to be shipped as a binary.
The policy does suggest that source under a reciprocal license should be clearly marked as such, primarily to avoid it (or dependencies on it) being intermingled with other ASL code. I think that since BIRT is packaged as its own component we are well on the way to this. We may just want to consider whether this code belongs in "framework" as opposed to "applications" or "specialpurpose". At the least, we should include a NOTICE-BIRT-IS-EPL file or something at the root of the component. Those issues aside, my opinion is that including the EPL licensed code is legitimate. Hans Bakker wrote: > We will either remove or replace all jsp's wih ftl's of the birt > component in the next few days... > -- Ean Schuessler, CTO e...@brainfood.com 214-720-0700 x 315 Brainfood, Inc. http://www.brainfood.com
