I thought it might be helpful to give some background on the "all rights
reserved" phrase. The requirement for this phrase originated in the
Buenos Aires Convention of 1910, which provided that a copyright owner had
to make an express statement of the reservation of property rights in
order to have copyright protection in all countries that were party to the
convention. Because of subsequent changes in copyright law that I won't
bore you with (but can if you really want....), this phrase essentially
became useless for works first published in the United States and most
other North and South American countries. However, there are still a few
countries in which this is a meaningful declaration, and for that reason
IBM (and many other copyright owners, including ASF in its standard
notice) retain this phrase to avoid such an exposure. It does not in any
way change or restrict license grants that are made by the copyright
owner.
As far as the copyright notice in the individual files, while I'm not
certain that there is a problem regarding the Apache Derby reference, it
would be consistent with the ASL v.2.0 instructions to add a notice
stating: "Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License." That
should remove any ambiguity.
Cheers,
Jennifer
"Roy T. Fielding" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
09/24/2004 05:40 PM
Please respond to general
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
cc: Derby Development <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Derby code copyright question
On Sep 24, 2004, at 4:27 AM, Rodent of Unusual Size wrote:
> okey, after discussing this in seven different directions, we
> have a clear conclusion, which i'll summarise here:
A conclusion by whom? The board? Robyn? IBM?
> 1. the NOTICE file (or NOTICE.txt) gets created if it doesn't
> already exist, and this gets added to it:
>
> Portions of Apache Derby are © Copyright 2004 International
> Business Machines Corporation. All rights reserved.
-1 The NOTICE file cannot contain restrictions on the license.
"All rights reserved" is a restriction -- it is contradicting
the irrevocable copyright license.
> if there are earlier copyright years in any any of the main files,
> the earliest one of all should be taken and used to change the
> notice
> to 'Copyright <earliest-year>, 2004 International ..'. in other
> words,
> the range of copyright years in the NOTICE file should be the
> earliest
> one with IBM's name on it in the sources, followed by ', 2004'.
>
> 2. the ibm copyright in the individual files gets replaced with
>
> Apache Derby © Copyright 2004 The Apache Software Foundation.
> All rights reserved.
>
> and reference to the apache licence added as described in
> http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html#apply
>
> et vóilà! that item can then get checked off the incubation goal list
> and we can focus on *real* code issues. :-)
No, it does not. It means the code in the individual files is not
licensed under the AL2. It means that if someone wants to take an
individual function out of an individual file and add it to their
wizz-bang programmable dog, they have to ask permission from IBM.
In short, their is no F*ing way this is going into code at the ASF.
The copyright notice in the file has to say THIS FILE MAY BE COPIED
under the terms of the Apache License. It cannot just say "Apache
Derby" may be copied, since that name is not bound to any specific
expression, and copyright notices that are not bound to an expression
are null and void.
....Roy
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