Re: Changing license to Apache License 2.0?

The problem with our licence is the advertisement clause. With that,
our license is not even OSI-approved (anymore?), and most importantly,
many has complained about this restriction. To fix that, we could just
switch to 3-clause BSD license. But I thought that if we change the
licence anyway, ASL 2 would be better, as it's far more widely used
and as such more recognized in the Java world. Corporate layers can
have surprising ideas (like, some may will miss the patent
indemnification clause in the future... I really don't know), so I
thought the safest thing to do is to join the herd.

That ASL 2 is incompatible with GPLv2 is a good point, however, given
how omnipresent ASL 2 is in the Java ecosystem, I wonder what will use
FreeMarker (especially a new version of it) and yet not have any ASL 2
dependency. So is that a real problem?

Note the other important change as well: the owner will change. Any
comments on that?

-- 
Thanks,
 Daniel Dekany


Wednesday, July 24, 2013, 2:55:45 PM, Attila Szegedi wrote:

> I'm somewhat interested in the "why".
>
> The only substantial difference I see between the two licenses is
> that Apache also has patent indemnification clauses. Admittedly, I
> think that's a good thing, but I'm wondering if that's a substantial
> need for most of our users.
>
> One specific issue where BSD is more permissive than Apache is that
> BSD is one-way compatible with GPLv2 (e.g. you can incorporate BSD
> software into GPLv2 software), but Apache isn't, specifically
> because of the patent indemnification language that GPLv2 lacks;
> Apache is one-way compatible with GPLv3 though.
>
> So, one consequence of the switch from BSD to Apache would be that
> people could no longer incorporate FreeMarker into software that's
> offered under GPLv2. I'm not saying that I'm against the move, just
> saying that I want to make sure everybody understands the implications.
>
> Attila.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Daniel Dekany <[email protected]> wrote:
> I would like to change the licence of FreeMarker from the 4-clause
> BSD-style licence to Apache License 2.0. The copyright owner would
> also change from "The Visigoth Software Society" (VSS) to "Attila
> Szegedi, Dániel Dékány, Jonathan Revusky" (they are the current
> project owners according the CLA) as VSS is inactive. This I would
> like to do as soon as possible, like even starting from FreeMarker
> 2.3.21.
>
> Attila, Jonathan, do you agree, or want something differently?
>
> Anybody has advices or any comments on this mater? (Like, if you
> depend heavily on FreeMarker and have a company lawyer to ask, that
> would great. All help is appreciated!)
>
> --
> Thanks,
>  Daniel Dekany
>
>


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