Lightbend’s CLA doesn’t transfer the copyright, but what it does is
it allows Lightbend to “sublicense” it as proprietary, which I guess
(IANAL, etc) is why they can legally change the license in their
repository without mentioning that some of that code is still available
as ASL-2.
If Johannes is the author of that PR, it’s a big deal, because he
still owns the copyright for his work. This case, as far as I’m
concerned, is closed.
My objection was about PRs in general — if a PR was made, that
doesn’t mean that the contribution was licensed under ASL-2, just
because the repository’s LICENSE was indicating ASL-2 at that time.
Consider the situation in which (royal) you made a PR to Akka when it
was licensed as ASL-2, but it gets rejected for whatever reason.
That’s life, and you move on. Well, what happens if Lightbend copies
the code in that rejected PR, after the license changed? The original PR
was rejected, it was never “distributed”, you never agreed to the
merge, because the merge never happened. The PR itself was only a
proposal, after all.
Therefore I’m wondering — is it legal to copy code from PRs that
were open before the license change? Are those PRs actually licensed as
ASL-2?
If yes, well, let’s copy them all, I’m sure there are gems in there.
But my hunch is that there are issues with it, and I’d really like to
know the answer to this conundrum, as copyright law is really confusing
for me.
And does the ASF have some legal expertise available, such that we can
settle these matters?
On 3 Nov 2022, at 22:54, Greg Methvin wrote:
My understanding is that the Lightbend CLA only gives Lightbend a
license
to use and redistribute the code; it doesn't transfer copyright. Where
it
gets tricky is that many PRs can incorporate parts of the existing
code in
various ways, so are effectively a derivative work rather than being
totally original, and you're on shaky ground unless you can prove that
the
code it's based on is entirely ASL licensed. But like you said, the
commit
it's based on is entirely ASL licensed code so there is no issue.
On Thu, Nov 3, 2022 at 10:50 AM Jean-Luc Deprez
<[email protected]>
wrote:
Fact that Johannes authored most of the work wouldn't matter much, as
I'd
guess copyright transfer would be in place.
But what Johannes stated doing is the legal ground. A git commit is a
copy
of the source, if that copy contains the ASL license instead of the
BSL,
the ASL terms apply. So the last commit on branch before BSL merge is
safe.
Which is the legal ground for this whole endeavor anyway.
On Thu, Nov 3, 2022, 12:44 PJ Fanning <[email protected]> wrote:
The original PR was created before the license was changed. I think
it
should be safe to take into pekko-http, especially since Johannes
who
wrote the original PR is and is offering to help with getting it
into
pekko-http.
On Thu, 3 Nov 2022 at 12:29, Alexandru Nedelcu <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi,
I’m resending this message from the “right” email address
🙂
sorry for the duplicate…
On 3 Nov 2022, at 12:07, Johannes Rudolph wrote:
(Obviously, we should use the state of the scala-3 branch before
the
license change. Afterwards, a merge from main was added containing
the
license change.)
It would be great to merge that scala-3 branch. I think Akka-HTTP
is
what’s keeping us at $work from migrating to Scala 3 (plus other
annoyances, but this is the big one).
However — I’d ask if we are allowed.
I am not a lawyer. Does code in that PR represent code that’s
released
under APL-2.0? My hunch is that there may be issues with this.
I think we should ask someone with legal expertise if we are
allowed.
Can ASF help?
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Alexandru Nedelcu
https://alexn.org
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