On 12/29/06, Stefano Bagnara <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
robert burrell donkin wrote:
> IANAL but i'll try to help...
>
> AIUI intellectual property is a loose term grouping several distinct
> areas of law:
>
> * trademarks
> * trade secrets
> * patents
> * copyright
>
> unless you hold patents, are party to trade secrets or plan to
> infringe trademarks then copyright's the main issue right now.
I think that for DK we have to deal with their patent and the license
for Implementing the Specification.
http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys/patentlicense1-2.html
We need ASF legal office to review that license to see if we can
distribute a DK implementation under ASF umbrella with an ASL2 project
using that patent license.
it may be more complicated than that
http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys/patentlicense1-2.html is a
software patent license
IANAL but here's one way to read the words. the patent license is
sublicensable (2.1) but contains a reciprocal patent grant clause
(3.1). this goes further than the apache license patent grant (3). it
seems to me that this means that the Yahoo! license cannot be
sublicensed under AL2.0.
however, provided that Yahoo! is not a contributor, i think that
Yahoo! and AL2.0 cover separate distinct subjects: Yahoo!'s patent
claims and contributors patent and copyright claims. i think that it
would be safe to use a composite LICENSE together with the correct
words in the NOTICE file.
but it's not just the correct interpretation of the words that's
important. even if the implementation could be developed with legal
risk to the contributors, apache policy would need to be taken into
consideration. policy is important: by sticking to our principles,
we've played a successful role in persuading bodies to free up
standards for open source implementors. the interaction between
copyright and patents in the open source is new and complex. policy in
this area is still in the process of being formed.
it's unfortunate that the Yahoo! is good but reciprocal. i'm not sure
whether that clause is necessary: mutually assured patent destruction
is usually thought to be good enough.
(basically, none of the big software houses can use their patents
against one another: the US patent office has granted so many poor
quality patents over the years that it is believed impossible to
create any enterprise class application that is not heavily
encumbered. to engage in patent litigation with one another would
inevitably result in use of all software created by each company
being halted until the case reaches the US supreme court.)
so might take time to sort this one out...
THe only other license usable is GPLv2 that unfortunately is not
compatible with ASL2.
AFAIK Noel forwarded a similar request to some ASF license expert member
a lot of weeks ago, but I think we had no answers.
Tom: I think you should file a JIRA issue and grant rights for inclusion
to ASF (there is a flag when you add attachment). Make sure to add a
comment including a link to the license above so maybe once we have the
code we can try to hurry an answer.
i think that a CLA or a software grant would be more appropriate in
this case but JIRA's the usual first port of call.
since my reading of the licenses indicates that it's safe to develop,
one possibility would be to offshore the development whilst the legal
issues are sorted out.
googlecode's fast and uses subversion. svn:externals could be used to
easily create a composite source. discussions would be fine on this
list but the code would be offshore for the time being. i'd be happy
to help Tom apply appropriate headers and check that the statements
required by Yahoo! are in the right place.
opinions?
- robert
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