Well, as I said, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not about to argue legal issues with you :-)
All I can do is reiterate that the lawyers involved (a) felt that this was required as a gateway to providing commit permissions to our repository, (b) that it was separate from the license itself, and (c) that everything was fully compatible. It's been reviewed and ratified by additional legal teams over the years as other contributing corporations and organizations have joined. You are welcome to contact the legal departments of the contributing organizations (as shown on our web site) to request a legal explanation. On Aug 29, 2014, at 10:02 AM, Jed Brown <j...@jedbrown.org> wrote: > Ralph Castain <r...@open-mpi.org> writes: > >> I'm not a lawyer, but that agreement was formulated by the lawyers of >> several national labs, universities, and corporations back at the very >> beginning of the project, and so that's what we have to use. > > MPICH does the same thing, but the CLA grants permission to redistribute > under the terms of the Apache-2.0 license, yet the product is being > distributed under a license that is not compatible with Apache-2.0. > > Even more strongly, lots of BSD-style permissive software is > incorporated into GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 distributions (this direction is > well-tested). Meanwhile, Apache-2.0 is famously incompatible with GPLv2 > and LGPLv2.1. > > "Please note that this license is not compatible with GPL version 2, > because it has some requirements that are not in that GPL > version. These include certain patent termination and indemnification > provisions." -- https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2 > > License compatibility is a transitive property, so you certainly can't > distribute Apache-2.0 software under a BSD-style license (as shown in > the compatibility chart I posted). > >> According to the lawyers, it is indeed compatible. I'll let them argue >> it :-) > > I'd be interested in hearing the legal argument for why the apparent > incompatibility is legally acceptable. I'm not familiar with other > projects using this particular combination.
