Re: Changing license to Apache License 2.0?

   In case this information is useful to those looking at this, the FSF
seems recommends the ASLv2 over the BSD licenses for permissive licenses,
even with the GPL 2.0 incompatibility, due to the more clearly defined
patent language.  (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2 /
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ModifiedBSD)  Since the FSF
has been encouraging GPLed projects to move from a strict GPLv2 only to
either "GPLv2 or later" or "GPLv3 or later", this stance doesn't surprise
me.  I think a lot of people of started to become very concerned about the
patent issue due to all of the patent troll lawsuits going around in the
last few years and the with patent office issuing a lot more (rather
broadly defined) technical patents.

Matthew





On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 8:41 AM, Daniel Dekany <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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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