On Jul 29, 2005, at 6:38 PM, Dalibor Topic wrote:
Thanks for the fast reply, Roy. Could you elaborate a bit on what the
MIT
license specifically lacks to meet the terms?
The parts that aren't in the ASL2, particularly in regards to
retaining the NOTICE file's notices.
Yes, provided the license and notices within the source code of
the original work remain intact.
OK. I am pretty new to the concept of sublicensing, so please bear
with me
while I try to figure out what the limits are. I've already seen that
different Academic licenses have different ways to go about
sublicensing,
which is somewhat confusing.
You have Larry's book, right?
Is there some FAQ from the ASF on how the Apache Software License 2.0
works in practice?
No, we prefer to have people read the license itself.
I'd imagine that to be a regular question for
companies and individuals alike, who wish to reuse ASF's software in
their own solutions, and are freshly starting to figure out the
licensing framework within which the ASF operates.
"Make money fast by creating propretary forks of ASFs software", that
sort of stuff. ;)
They can afford a lawyer who an read it for them.
Ditto, it is separable and therefore not a derivative work.
OK. Then let me try something else, a bit more creative, that weaves
the Apache code together with my work.
Let's say I, in a fit of Art, use my webcam to create a mugshot of
myself and turn it into a PNG file of, say, 1024x768 pixels.
Then I turn the 'face.png' file into a pure HTML rendering of the
PNG file, such that in a 1024x768 sized table, each table cell
corresponds to one pixel of the PNG picture, and its background colour
is chosen according to the colour of the corresponding pixel.
In other words, something like
http://perl.infoware.ne.jp/~hoyama/toro.gif.html only with a nice
picture of myself.
For each cell of the huge table, then, I proceed to insert the
corresponding character in the stream of the Apache Software 2.0
licensed source code into each cell. In order to have good looking
code not ruin my HTMLized picture, I also set the text colour for
each cell to the colour of the backgound of each cell, making it
invisible, but nevertheless adding to the significance, and weight
of my artwork.
Again, there is established precedent for artwork that declares
such things to be a copy of the original work, not a derivative work.
The result is then just a collective work.
I chose to publish the resulting HTML file under the MIT license.
Is it a Derivative Work under the apache license? Under which
license are the single, invisible characters in each cell? Under
which license is the output of lynx -dump on the file?
If separability is the key issue here, then let my Derivative Work
consist of the original Work with all comments, save for copyright
notices removed.
The Apache License does not give permission to create a derivative
work that lacks the copyright notices.
We don't own any patents. The contributors own the patents and they
choose whether or not the license is actually terminated in that case.
Interesting. This is the first time I hear that the termination
in a patent retaliation clause is not mandatory. I have always
read "shall" to mean "will/must", rather than meaning "may".
An owner has the right to license what they own however
they wish. The only thing that terminates is the Apache
requirement that the contributor must provide that license
to the person litigating against them.
In contrast, if you receive software via the GPL or MIX/X or
BSD licenses, there is no patent license at all and your rights
are equivalent to those where the license was terminated.
Is that any different from someone who has received a Derivative Work
based on software covered by the ASL2? Afaict, the patent license
grant
does not mention granting any rights to Derivative Works. I suppose
I am wrong, but I can't see it in the license yet.
The patent grant is in the CLA, not ASL2.
It uses pretty much the same language as far as I can see, without
mentioning Derivative Works, so the question remains: does the patent
grant extend to Derivative Works?
Read it again. The patent license is granted to the recipients
(people/legal entities), not to a copy of software. Derivative
Works is a term from copyright law, not patent law, and thus has
no relevance to the patent discussion at all.
....Roy
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
