See below. First, this should have been asked on legal-discuss.
Second, the answers below are just my opinion.
On Aug 16, 2009, at 4:24 PM, Joe Schaefer wrote:
I'm trying to coax out a release of Apache Thrift and ran into a
few obstacles. Maybe you can offer me a little guidance?
First, I found that the CCLA from Facebook excludes
contributions from 3rd parties who wrote code for Thrift
prior to the move to Apache. With the exception of imeem.com,
all of the corporate entities appear to have a CCLA on file
with us. I've attempted to contact the folks from imeem.com
to request that a CCLA be filed for their Thrift work.
I've also found that there are 6 individuals listed in the
Facebook CCLA who do not have ICLAs with us and have accordingly
contacted them as well.
Was the Facebook CCLA a software grant and were the 6 individuals
Facebook employees (if not, why were they listed in the CCLA)? If they
did their development on behalf of Facebook then as I understand it
Facebook owns the rights to the software and ICLAs shouldn't be
required. The software grant from Facebook would be enough.
So the first question is: do we have any contingency strategies
for the likely situation where not all past contributors to Thrift
will have paperwork on file in the near future? Can Thrift still
cut a release or does that block it? Thrift was in fact an open
source project prior to coming here, and it *has* released stuff under
an alternate license. Does that mitigate the issue at all?
See my comment above.
The second question regards the LICENSE file. I'm accustomed to
seeing all the licenses for all the code to be distributed listed
in the LICENSE file, but don't see anywhere within the Incubator
docs that this concept is mandatory. I've been pushing Thrift to
do this because that's the way I've usually seen it done but the
idea hasn't gained any traction with the thrift devs yet. Is there
such a policy, does it simply constitute best practice, or am I
barking up the wrong tree?
I was under the impression the LICENSE file should contain the Apache
license. All other licenses should be referenced in the NOTICE file.
See http://www.apache.org/licenses/.
The third issue is that Thrift intends to distribute with an LGPL
dependency on their build system. I'm familiar with the scary
language
adopted by the legal team regarding the LGPL, but don't consider this
situation to be problematic since it's just a few Makefiles and such.
Will I need to get special permission from legal for this?
If they are using Maven 2 and if the LGPL dependency is referenced as
a dependency in the pom such that it is downloaded during the build
and is not distributed with Apache software (or if the build process
is functionally equivalent to this), I personally would have no
problem with it being used as part of the build. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-19
and https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-23 seem similar to
this. In general, anything involving software in Category X should
seek permission. The best way is to create a Jira issue.
Ralph
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