Collective licenses
Matthew Langham blogged about our licensing page being confusing, and since I drove the creation of that page I thought I'd take a stab at explaining it.
For the record, I'm not a lawyer. :)
As I understand it, there are two important things that you can do with other people’s copyrighted works if you have an open source license to do so: You can create derivative works and/or you can create collective works.
Our Core Stack is a collective work in that it collects a number of otherwise independent components together. The collection includes some things that SpikeSource developed, including installers, configuation, and documentation etc that applies to the collection generally. There are also a couple of small components. SpikeSource owns and copyrights those portions. But most of the collection is important open source software - httpd, tomcat, etc - that is owned by other parties. Those parties distribute their components under open source licenses. The other licenses permit us to collect those components into our collective work.
Our collective work has a license that applies to the collection itself, as well as to the SpikeSource owned portions of the stack content: the Open Software License (OSL) version 2.1, which is a pre-existing OSI-approved license.
Nothing in the license applying to the collection in any way supercedes the licenses on the components thus collected. Some of those third-party licenses have reciprocity and other conditions, and if you modify the sources of those components and redistribute, you must also distribute the changes you made. Some of those licenses have other conditions as well.
The licensing page goes on to disclose the applicable licenses, so you can be fully informed of all relevant license conditions that may affect your use of the stack.
Licensing makes my brain hurt. I thought we'd done a fairly good job at explaining this topic on our web site, but I guess I need to give some thought on how to improve it.
Hi glen,
just to be clear - I have no problem with the license you are using for the stack - it is more the explanation page that seems unclear.
The problem I see is that the wording of the page seems to contradict itself. On the one hand you write that changes have to be given back to the community - but that cannot be true if the changes are made to an Apache licensed component (as the license doesn't make you do that) _and_ your license doesn't supercede the included licenses.
So if I were to install your stack and then modify an Apache component - what happens?
If I were to take your stack modifiy a component and want to distribute a thus modified stack (I'm not sure it's technically posible to do that) - what happens?
So I think maybe adding a FAQ would be a good idea - and perhaps rewording the parts I highlighted.
Thanks for commenting!
Matthew
Matthew Langham [matthew@silentpenguin.com]
For the record... I thought the license was clear enough. Yes, the
licenses for the individual components take precedence over the license for
the stack as a whole... seems obvious that this should be so. But perhaps
not to everybody.
Anyway... the clarification is good, if perhaps not strictly essential.
Cheers...