On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Jon Stevens wrote:
> There is no way in hell that I'm going agree to put the ASF (or myself) in a
> position to take responsibility for any legal claims that come up as a
> result of use of this .jar file. Carefully read supplemental section #2 (v).
Commenting here without sufficient context, so apologies if I
misunderstand the situation...
If this code was committed to Apache CVS by Sun employees, then it was
done so by the terms of their contributor agreements with Apache, which
states that all contributed IP becomes property of the ASF, to be
published under the Apache license.
While we do allow software with different licenses in Apache codebases
(such as Henry Spencer's regex package in httpd 1.3) those licenses must
be a rough subset of the Apache license, so that the aggregate license on
the whole must still be the Apache license.
As per our agreement with Sun related to the right to implement the
servlet API, we do have the right to distribute specific Sun code as a
convenience to end-users, such as javac. We have the right to distribute
that bytecode under the Apache license, despite not having the actual
source. That code must be clearly marked as not ASF IP. There is no
existing agreement covering other jar files.
It is important that when someone downloads the code from apache.org, they
don't have to go searching through the source code trying to determine
what license the code is *actually* under. They have to trust that when
the top-level COPYRIGHT file (or equivalent) gives them the Apache
license, that's the license the whole package is actually under.
Brian
