What the board has decided about this committee or office, and the reports it filed, most recent first. Generated from the published minutes.
These categorised views are best effort. They are read from the published minutes by a program, and what it can attribute to a committee depends on how each resolution happens to be worded — so a page may be incomplete, and nothing here overrides the minutes themselves. The raw minutes are the source of truth.
Please note. The board approves the minutes of a meeting at the meeting after it, and they are published then - so the most recent meeting is not usually here. ASF Members can read the draft in the board's own repository until it is.
[raw] the published minutes, which are the record. [main index]
| Date | Action | Decided by |
|---|---|---|
| 2018-09-19 | Appointed Roman Shaposhnik | the board, by resolution |
| 2017-05-17 | Appointed Chris Mattmann | the board, by resolution |
| 2017-02-27 | Appointed Marvin Humphrey | the board, by resolution |
| 2013-11-20 | Appointed Jim Jagielski | the board, by resolution |
| 2007-07-18 | Appointed Sam Ruby | the board, by resolution |
| 2005-06-22 | Appointed Cliff Schmidt | the board, by resolution |
This is my first report as VP Legal Affairs, having taken over from Roman Shaposhnik following last month's board meeting. July was a fairly quiet month on the public legal lists. There are currently 6 open LEGAL JIRA issues. Three new LEGAL issues were raised during July, covering third party data licensing, source header policy, and a code donation; one has already been resolved. A review of the ASF bylaws was undertaken. Most items examined raised no concerns or only minor ones carrying little or no risk. Three items warrant board attention and are under discussion: how board committees are structured and operated under the bylaws, whether STV satisfies the plurality requirement for director elections (3.9), and PMC composition with respect to non-Member members (6.3). The main activity this month has been a proposal to terminate the Legal Affairs Committee and re-grant its powers explicitly to the office of VP Legal. A similar restructure is under discussion for Security, and both discussions are ongoing. Trademark matters would be explicitly carved out as delegated to VP Brand Management, with bylaws matters and the initiation or settlement of litigation reserved to the board. The resolution would ratify the committee's past acts, and all current committee members are expected to continue as an advisory legal team. Monthly reporting will continue unchanged. Feedback is being incorporated and a resolution will come to the board once discussion has concluded. A board agenda item proposes appointing Zili Chen (tison) as Assistant VP Legal Affairs, filling the vacant assistant role.
No report was submitted.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving many of LEGAL issues, we are at a dramatic 3 open issues right now. VP Legal announced his intent to resign and kicked-off a follow-on process on the legal-private: https://lists.apache.org/thread/mmd4sg4bjx5bxvlc0h52ldcl8qyqh9nz
No report was submitted.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. Many thanks to Henri Yandell for making us go to the lowest number of outstanding LEGAL issues ever (which is 9). We have formally onboarded Jude Smith as an ASF "committer" on the LEGAL committee and he is now known as jasmith@apache.org DLAPiper has gotten back to us with the good news on the outstanding subpoena indicating that they checked the court docket, and the company that issued the subpoena to ASF has filed a joint request with the plaintiff to dismiss the case with prejudice. The bad news is that our outstanding pipeline of subpoenas is now at 3 and that's WAY more than what our volunteer workforce can handle. We are working with DLAPiper to help but they have been really slow when it comes to a formal engagement. This may turn into a significant risk for the foundation.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we decreased the number of outstanding issues to 22 (compared to 24 past month) Justin Colannino was recommended to us as a legal resource that can help with governance issues short-term and potentially other issues long-term. VP Legal recommended supporting that engagement and so far it seems to be unopposed.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 25 issues compared to the last month. We started working with DLAPiper on two new subpoenas. Note that one came with additional weird summon via snail mail that we need to understand how to address. Even if DLAPiper won't be able to help us long term with these -- we expect and answer on how to handle the additional summon this week. In general, we need to, once again solicit additional pro-bono legal counsel hours since with DLAPiper (however excellent their support has been) we're constantly running into cross-representations issue and that slows things down at best (they need to obtain a waiver) or blocks us from using their services at worst. I started poking around legal committee members to see if they know any lawyers who may want to do this kind of work for us, but I would also encourage board members to do the same. We've officially offered committer privileges to Jude Smith (something that had a lazy consensus about two months ago on Legal Committee mailing list -- but just slipped through the cracks on my TODO list -- sorry about that). Based on conversation with some of the board members around the Code of Conduct, VP Legal has sent a clarification to the board@ mailing list and is awaiting further instructions from the board. The US DoJ was interested in understanding more about how the foundation works, the license, and specifically the situation with Fivetran's Proposed Acquisition of dbt Labs. Ruth Suehle took the lead on taking care of that interview. We have received one more request for detailed export compliance statement from Thales Global Services and responded with our general policy. Proposal for Updating Apache License 2.0 to Version 3.0 (brought by an outside contributor) has been rejected.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 24 issues compared to the last month. The two subpoenas were dealt with. No further action is required on our part at this point. Many thanks to Jude Smith for providing pro-bono help on this. The discussion around Generative AI tools is going on on members@ and VP Legal has provided a purely legal take on the concerns. The rest of the discussion (that has nothing to do with legal) seems to still go on.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 24 issues compared to the last month. We received a request to review proposed ASF Brand Contest Rules -- plan to be done with the review by the end of this week.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are about flat at 24 issues compared to the last month. We received two new subpoenas and are working with DLAPiper on our official response to them. Neither appears to be problematic and in fact we may end up with just one that needs any non trivial work. All the subpoenas (current and past) can be found in svn@private/foundation/legal/subpoenas should board members be curious about the details. Once again, we received an inquiry from a procurement department of a corporation using ASF projects asking us to amend the language of the Apache License v2. The request was denied with a brief explanation given on our stance. We have received a couple of DMCA takedown notices but they were deemed to be frivolous and not meeting the bar of our action.
No report was submitted.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are slightly up at 22 outstanding issues in the LEGAL JIRA. Secretary reached out requesting clarifications around University of California Release of Rights for the codebase related to the Apache Texera (Incubating) and we provided the needed guidance on accepting the code. Additionally we provided guidance to the Secretary on receiving official documents from the Ant group (China). I have presented in the Apereo MicroConference on the Generative AI Tool guidance that was developed at the ASF. One of the Subpoenas we were working on reached a milestone with the litigating counsels receiving all the information they requested from us. Nothing else to do here (and no additional involvement from the DLA Piper required).
No report was submitted.
No report was submitted.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. In fact, we got a ~50% reduction of the outstanding JIRAs going from 30 last month to only 17 this month. A lot of the credit here goes to Andrew Musselman for shepherding this kind of backlog grooming. We're still working with DLAPiper on two subpoenas -- no action required from the board at this time -- since we're handling everything in a timely fashion. The committee has decided to extend invitation to Andrew Musselman and offer him joining the committee as a full member. The resolution has been submitted to the board this cycle.
No report was submitted.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 30 issues compared to the last month. We're still working with DLAPiper on two subpoenas -- no action required from the board at this time -- since we're handling everything in a timely fashion. All the subpoenas (current and past) can be found in svn@private/foundation/legal/subpoenas should board members be curious about the details. VP Legal has advised members tweaking ASF Release Policy on the language and semantics of what it means to bypass a 72-hours mandatory release period. The PR with the final language has been merged and is now available on our website. Once again, we received an inquiry from a procurement department of a corporation using ASF projects asking us to ammend the language of the Apache License v2. The request was denied with a brief explanation given on our stance. We have received a couple of DMCA takedown notices for the content of the infamous AAR-xxx JIRA space. The offending links were promptly taken down. Andrew Musselman expressed his interest in shadowing VP Legal and we're scheduled to start that conversation next week.
No report was submitted.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 30 issues compared to the last month. We're working with DLAPiper on two subpoenas -- no action required from the board at this time -- since we're handling everything in a timely fashion. Tika PMCs was threaten with a DMCA takedown notice for a small amount of allegedly copyrighted material that they hosted as part of their testing artifacts. The PMC promptly complied with the removal (we didn't engage in figuring out whether the allegations were true or not) and there's no issue with this at the time.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 30 issues compared to the last month. We're working with DLAPiper on two subpoenas -- no action required from the board at this time -- since we're handling everything in a timely fashion, but please see a private section below for a bit more color. Sadly, given the amount of time spent on two subpoenas, I ran out of time on adding the explanation of Sublicense vs. Relicense language to our LEGAL FAQ (see LEGAL-687 for more details). I'm going to reach out to the rest of the committee members for help to unblock this. We were contacted by the European Commission with a request to comment on a merger deal (see private section for more details on this). The initial questionnaire was clearly aimed at a traditional software organization competing in the market. Since the ASF is nothing like that and has quite unique role to play in the Open Source Software supply chain we engaged with the EC representative to explain our charter and mission first. Quite to our mutual delight that explanation alone resolved the matter completely (without answering said detailed questionnaire).
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are slightly up at 30 issues (from 27 last month). We received one DMCA Takedown Notice and promptly addressed it. No further action is necessary. An outside vendor contacted us requesting that we become Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) compliant by January 17, 2025. We pointed out that their request was misdirected. Sublicense vs. Relicense language was discussed and we're working on adding the explanation to the LEGAL FAQ (see LEGAL-687 for more details). We have received a public request for clarification on the issues of "license enforcement when it comes to sanctions". We didn't provide an official public response (simply because we can NOT provide official legal advice to community members).
No report was submitted.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are slightly up at 25 issues (from 23 last month). We had a corporate legal department of a EU corporation reach out to us and suggest modified terms of the Apache License. The request was denied. Based on the additional guidance published by US Export Administration we are debating stopping BIS notifications for our projects.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are slightly up at 23 issues (from 19 last month).
No report was submitted.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are slightly up at 21 issues (from 19). We had a tip about potential Infringement of the Apache Free Software License by a company selling medical devices. The person was routed to an appropriate ASF community (httpd) for the next steps. We haven't heard from the httpd PMC on the matter since. U.S. Federal Trade Commission reached out to us regarding an anti-trust investigation. After explaining the basics of how ASF works they proceeded to have a conversation with PMC members of Apache Airflow. After a bit of delay (and frankly prodding) Annual Report FY2024 Legal section was submitted.
No report was submitted.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 19 issues. Not really much else to report.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 19 issues. M&P reached out to VP Legal regarding clarifying implications for running sweepstakes. We reviewed the proposed T&Cs and suggested one small clarification. Other than that this project is good to go from our perspective.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are slightly up at 19 issues (from 17 last month). M&P reached out to VP Legal regarding clarifying implications for running sweepstakes. There was a brief discussion around patent implications of the Apache License v2. The takeaway, as always, has been that the ASF's official position is the text of the license. It is self-descriptive, but we do provide a reasonable amount of FAQ material as well.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are standing flat at 17 issues.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we made a significant dent in the number and are standing flat at 17 issues.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we made a significant dent in the number and are a tiny bit up now standing at 17 (from 16 last month). An individual reached out to us, mistakengly thinking that ASF Legal plays a role in any dispute over the implications of the Apache License v2. It was explained that since the project in question isn't part of the ASF (on top which it was it wasn't even clear if it was under ALv2) we are not getting involved.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we made a significant dent in the number and are now standing at 16 (from 24 last month). Jude Smith began his volunteering for the ASF as a pro-bono attorney. See a more details introduction on legal-discuss. I picked up an item that sadly fell through the cracks in the past month: our by-laws review. We are actually pretty close to a final draft, but one more iteration with DLAPiper folks is needed. We are arranging consultations with various licensed legal professionals around implications of various clauses in the proposed CRA legislation. This is done in cooperation with VP Public Affairs and with a great deal of support from the Linux Foundation's legal team. I had a great discussion with the head of OpenUK and was intrigued by her thoughts on how some of the ramifications of CRA can be mitigated through the clever use of insurance products. More details to come (provided we both find it applicable to the ASF's usecase).
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are slightly up at 24 outstanding issues (from 22 last month). Otherwise the month was extremely calm and uneventful.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 22 outstanding issues. The committee has successfully published and promoted a Generative Tooling Guidance and FAQ on Legal responsibilities within the foundation. Both documents were received with very positive feedback from the membership and committers. VP Legal attended an Open Source Congress in Geneva hosted by the Linux Foundation. The event was a nice opportunity to synchronize the view points of various leaders in open source organizations on the plethora of topics. Despite the VP Public Affairs's strongly voiced opinion that VP Legal participating in this event would lead ASF into a trap of having a binding opinion on a variety of topics nothing like that had happened. An opinion of VP Legal was requested on the ramifications of some of the recent legislation coming out of the Russian Federation. It was determined that from the legal perspective absolutely no action on the ASF's part is required.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 22 outstanding issues. Henri Yandell's draft of formal guidance for ASF contributors on using generative AI code assist tools (e.g. GitHub Co-pilot, etc.) has been successfully reviewed by Legal Committee and is ready to be published. Board resolution to add Henri Yandell to the Legal Committee has been submitted. We have cleaned up membership of legal-private@ to correspond to the current Legal Committee roster. legal-internal@ has been cleaned up to be legal-private@ plus some folks working in the office of the President. We have reached a consensus on the division of labor when it comes to legal matters between the Legal Committee and the office of the President. We're working on an official FAQ to clarify our joint understanding. Expect it to be sent for review and published in the next few weeks. We have clarified an outstanding issue for the Apache SVN community regarding licensing of old open.collab.net content to the ASF for re-hosting. VP Legal is expected to attend an Open Source Congress in Geneva hosted by the Linux Foundation last week of July.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 22 outstanding issues. Henri Yandell prepared the first draft of formal guidance for ASF contributors on using generative AI code assist tools (e.g. GitHub Co-pilot, etc.). Next step is to settle it with the legal committee and then members@. There appears to be some level of disagreement and the need for further clarification around split of Legal responsibilities between the office of the President of the ASF and the Legal Committee/VP Legal. See public emails discussion threads on legal-discuss@ and, likely, on board@ soon. Roman and David are scheduled to spend some time 1-1 to figure out the proposal here.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 22 outstanding issues. Henri Yandell and I are working on providing some amount of formal guidance for ASF contributors on using generative AI code assist tools (e.g. GitHub Co-pilot, etc.). This is done in coordination with Linux Foundation's legal team and Eclipse Foundation in order to harmonize our recommendations where reasonable. I got invited to the Open Source Congress in Geneva on July 27 to discuss, among other things, questions surrounding AI code assist tools and upcoming EU legislation. There appears to be some level of disagreement and the need for further clarification around split of Legal responsibilities between the office of the President of the ASF and the Legal Committee/VP Legal. See public emails discussion threads on legal-discuss@ and, likely, on board@ soon. Mark Radcliffe is expected to make an additional appeal to the board at this month's board meeting regarding legal aspects of the "Apache" name. He also has news to share when it comes to who will be our go-to contact at DLAPiper from now on.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 22 outstanding issues. The board is receiving continuous guidance on the legal aspects of the "Apache" name from DLAPiper.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are slightly up at 22 outstanding issues compared to 21 last month.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are slightly up at 21 outstanding issues compared to 19 last month. A discussion around updating contributor guidance around AI generated code is underway and anybody interested in participating is encouraged to comment on LEGAL-631
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 19 outstanding issues compared to last month. I was able to reach the folks at DLAPiper. Scheduling by-laws review for next week.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 19 outstanding issues compared to last month. Not being able to reach DLAPiper folks for a few months is becoming a bit of a problem. I may need to start looking more aggressively for how to re-connect with our contacts there. This also means that the process of finalizing the draft of the updated bylaws seems to be on hold for now.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are slightly up at 20 outstanding issues compared to 19 last month. I haven't been able to find availability on DLAPiper's end so the process of finalizing the draft of the updated bylaws seems to be on hold for now.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are down at 19 outstanding issues compared to 22 last month. The process of bylaws review is almost done. There's one last bit of reviewing the indemnity provisions that should be done by early next month.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 22 outstanding issues compared to last month. Prompted by Akka's transition to Business Source License 1.1 we started the process of advising the projects affected by this disruptive change (notably Apache Flink). The details can be found in LEGAL-619. The process of bylaws review is almost done. There's one last bit of reviewing the indemnity provisions that should be done by early next month.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 22 outstanding issues compared to last month. We finally kicked off the process of by-laws reviews with DLAPiper. We expect the updated draft to be available within weeks for the board review.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 22 outstanding issues compared to last month. We finally kicked off the process of by-laws reviews with DLAPiper. We expect the updated draft to be available in a month for the board review.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 22 outstanding issues compared to last month. There hasn't been much else happening aside from us working with DLAPiper on reviewing our by-laws. ApacheCON A/V rental contract agreement was reviewed and a few suggestions made.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat at 22 outstanding issues compared to last month. There hasn't been much else happening aside from us engaging with DLAPiper around reviewing our by-laws. Thanks to sebb we've been closing issues around our ECCN and release policies and processes with a number of INFRA JIRAs and direct patches resulting from that.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are slightly up to 22 from 20 outstanding issues compared to last month. There hasn't been much else happening aside from renewed interest in reviewing our by-laws in general and around particular language that may not be as relevant in 2022 as it was back in 1999. I will reach out to DLA Piper folks to see what is feasible. Thanks to sebb we've been reviewing our ECCN policies and processes with a number of INFRA JIRAs and direct patches resulting from that.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat with 20 outstanding issues compared to last month. Personally, I have been consumed by reacting to global events and wasn't able to dedicate much time at all to the committee this month. I apologize for that. However, I did keep an eye on all incoming legal traffic and luckily there wasn't anything that required committee's attention. At least not on the reactive side. Really hope that the coming month will be easier.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are slightly up to 20 from 17 outstanding issues compared to last month. Committee worked on helping prepare a set of responses to various US government officials and agencies regarding log4j security vulnerability. We have established a formal relationship with Gwyn Firth Murray Matau Legal Group and now have an extra resource to go to in case we need a formal legal opinion or help. We followed a standard ASF engagement model: our contract includes a certain number of pro-bono hours and we have negotiated a very reasonable rate on top of that. We reviewed an SOW agreement from a vendor providing us with D&I services.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. After resolving a handful of LEGAL issues, we are flat with 17 outstanding issues compared to last month. The biggest area of focus for the committee has been the fallout from log4j vulnerability and reaction to it by various government and commercial entities. We have spent some time working with the members of the security team in preparation for the The White House meeting and also responding to the official government inquiries. Our friends at DLA Piper recommended that we explore relationship with the Matau Legal Group to augment the number of pro-bono legal help available to us. The conversation has started but nothing to report back yet. Some of our members have expressed interest in signing the Lifter agreement at the PMC/Foundation level with Tidelift. The consensus on the committee side so far has been that we shouldn't be doing that at that level, however individuals may choose to do so. Since the discussion was no longer a legal one it was moved to the ComDev.
It's been an uneventful month. Committee members and others have taken good care of responding to and resolving issues. We have fewer open issues than last month (15). There is nothing that requires board attention. There's been some discussions around Javadoc licensing, if 3rd parties need a NOTICE file and some release policy tweaks.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. We've resolved quite a few issues and are flat with 17 outstanding issues compared to last month. We've discussed and reviewed a small tweak to the Release Policy and accepted a change clarifying the role of unreleased artifacts distributed to the developer community.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. We've resolved quite a few issues and are up to 17 from the 16 that were unresolved last month. We are working on extending the circle of Legal firms that can help us. More details on potential candidates in the private section. We provided advice to one of the PMCs on how to engage with TU Berlin research group around supporting European Research Council proposal that would include and Apache project. We received an unsolicited report evaluating ASF's performance from the Muellners Inc and determined it to be non-actionable from the ASF's legal point of view. Muellners Inc may decide to proceed with the dissemination of the report (and further actions) regardless of not receiving any feedback from us.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. We've resolved quite a few issues and are down to 16 from the 18 that were unresolved last month. Roman has been traveling and under a lot of additional pressure from $DAYJOB which limits the amount of time available to push on some of the outstanding ASF LEGAL issues. This is expected to improve greatly in the 2nd half of Oct.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. We've resolved quite a few issues and are down to 18 from the 19 that were unresolved last month. We started working (again!) on expanding the pool of pro-bono legal options available to us.
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. We've resolved quite a few issues and are down to 19 from the 26 that were unresolved last month. Work on simplifying our approach to ECCN filings is slowly progressing. We now have additional recommendations published by Linux Foundation and are in active discussions with their legal team on the details: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/understanding-us-export-controls-and-open-source-projects-2021-update/
Past month has been pretty calm. Committee members took good care of resolving most issues on time. We're currently slightly up at 26 unresolved issues. One notable discussion that took place was that of revisiting our approach to ECCN filings. The ECCN tracking page https://www.apache.org/licenses/exports/ was expected to be updated with a different layout but the effort seems to have stalled for now. There's not immediate need for us to change anything around ECCN, but it would be nice to resolve this in the coming months.
It's been a little busier this month with several discussions on a wide range of topics, including a couple that come up frequently. Committee members took good care of resolving these in time. We're resolved several outstanding issues and currently down to 24 unresolved issues. There has been discussions on gradle jars in source releases (LEGAL-570), changes in elastic search licensing, the LGPL dependency chardet (LEGAL-572), and clarifying the naming of 3rd party licenses that add additional incompatible clauses to the Apache license. Release and distribution policies has been updated and made more explicit, clarifying the use of Category B licensed items and jars containing compiled code in source releases. (In both cases, they cannot be included in source releases.)
One more pretty uneventful month: we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Committee members took good care of resolving most of these in time. We've cleared the queue quite a bit and are currently down to 25 unresolved LEGAL JIRAs. Thanks to Justin we've settled on a language clarifying our positions on modified Apache Licenses and how, while allowed, they should clearly be distanced from Apache License itself. Finally, there's work underway to attempt a split between a formal legal policy on binary releases and a community FAQ. Hopefully this will help to clarify it for our communities but it'll require use of contracting resources that INFRA has suggested.
No report was submitted.
One more pretty uneventful month: we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Committee members took good care of resolving most of these in time. We're slightly up at 35 unresolved issues this month. There has been some discussion about adding language clarifying our positions on modified Apache Licenses and how, while allowed, they should clearly be distanced from Apache License itself.
No report was submitted.
One more pretty uneventful month: we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Committee members took good care of resolving most of these in time. We're steady at 29 unresolved issues this month. The only three things worth noting are LEGAL-516 and a review of our bylaws. Justin and I will be finally bringing LEGAL-516 home by the end of 2020. It has remained open long enough and is clearly stalling. DLAPiper is still slow to re-engage -- I'm hoping Mark will have more time available for us before the end of the year.
One more pretty uneventful month: we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Committee members took good care of resolving most of these in time. We're steady at 29 unresolved issues this month. The only three things worth noting are LEGAL-516 and a review of our bylaws. LEGAL-516 is clearly stalling at this point and as per suggestion from Justin, I feel we need to resolve it once and for all by the end of the month -- it has been outstanding for way too long. DLAPiper is still slow to re-engage -- I'm hoping Mark will have more time available for us before the end of the year.
One more pretty uneventful month: we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Committee members took good care of resolving most of these in time. We're steady at 29 unresolved issues this month. The only three things worth noting are LEGAL-516, GitHub Actions and a final commitment from DLAPiper to a timeline for review of our bylaws. LEGAL-516 which has been dragging for way too long and at this point it feels like stalling. I think we're past the point where we can expect NVIDIA to come back and do the right things. My recommendation to the IPMC and board is to declare a firm deadline (perhaps next board meeting) by which we will have a ruling on how to proceed. GitHub Actions AKA LEGAL-537 is an exciting new development where we entered into an agreement with GitHub that allows a much more immediate consumption of ASF software through GitHub Actions mechanism. Finally, DLAPiper is now committed to do a final bylaws review by the November board meeting deadline. Mark's availability was sadly affected by the California wildfires in the month of Sep and early October.
This, again, was one of the most uneventful months on record (summer time perhaps?): we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Committee members took good care of resolving most of these in time. We're up 2 (to 29), unresolved issues this month. The only worthy event was that we finally got an agreement from DLAPiper to do a pro-bono full review of our by-laws. This is great timing giving the vote that is expected to happen on changing the gender pronouns.
This was one of the most uneventful months on record (summer time perhaps?): we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're up 1 (to 27), unresolved issues this month. Fun fact of the month: we've received our first legit request in Russian: LEGAL-534
For the past month we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're up 2 (to 26), unresolved issues this month. We received Hen's resignation from two of his positions: VP Jakarta EE and Assist VP Legal. Hen's contributions to this committee (and to the foundation in general!) have been vital to the day-to-day operations but also to the more strategic questions around ASF's general stance on various licensing and legal issues. In short, we wouldn't be in nearly as good of a shape without Hen around. We all eagerly await him coming back at some point! In the meantime we're looking for volunteers to fill his position and hope to have this resolved by the next month's board meeting. Discussion around MXNet release compliance is still ongoing in LEGAL-515 and LEGAL-516. Currently the ball is in the PPMC's court and we would recommend Incubator following up in a few weeks on the progress. There's been a fruitful discussion around binary distribution channels culminating with Justin's proposal of a policy update: https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r0db43d4124a1d09354e4dcebed2e5d78b311fcd16ca25d489ee03a7f%40%3Cgeneral.incubator.apache.org%3E Progress on requesting DLA Piper help with review of the bylaws have been slow. The reason for the slowness is surprising and somewhat embarrassing at the same time: it appears that DLA MX has issues with email sent through my GMail account. This has been noticed and fixed. Thanks to KAM we've got our DMCA Designated Agent Directory - Renewal done.
For the past month we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're up 2 (to 24), unresolved issues this month. In the previous report, we've alerted the board about LEGAL-515. At this point it seems that the MXNet PPMC and the Incubator are fully on top of this issue and are trying to make it right. Re-started binary distribution channels work based on the 'prior art' from the Incubator: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INCUBATOR/Distribution+Guidelines Had a conversation with DLA Piper regarding recent charges relating to services that go beyond their pro-bono offer to us. Overall, it was a very constructive discussion. Still it may behove the board to act on a recent thread titled 'Rethinking our approach for procuring day-to-day legal services for the ASF' TechTarget's reporter has requested an hour meeting to clarify our position on ICLAs, CCLAs and SGAs.
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're up 1 (to 22), unresolved issues this month. We received a request for an affidavit, but after extensive discussions within legal committee (with participation of DLA Piper folks) we've concluded that it is not in our best interest to respond at this time. I would like to draw board's attention to the discussion on LEGAL-515. It appears that the current binary convenience artifacts published by MXNet are in violation of ASF's release policy. So far we've advised the PMC to work through the issues, but it isn't clear whether they are willing to do so. ASF has appeared on the following docket https://dm.epiq11.com/case/broadvision/claims however after further review it was established that we have never had any commercial relationship with BroadVision and as such there's no reason to do anything. Due to recent global events, progress on various binary distribution channels that ASF controls is slow, but it is still on my radar.
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're up 1 (to 21), unresolved issues this month. Henri Yandell (in his VP Jakarta EE Relations capacity) closed the loop with Eclipse Foundation around relationship between ASF and Eclipse. There are no further actions required at this time. We received request for classification of the newly minted "Mulan PSL v2" license (LEGAL-513). This license originated in China and what makes it unusual is that the canonical text is in Chinese. It has already been approved by OSI. So far the consensus is that it is very close to the original ALv2 license and thus can be added to the Cat A. Our final decision is expected in a week or so. We have received an affidavit request for details on how Apache License applies to the projects we govern and what are the ramifications for the contributors and downstream consumers. We're working on this request and expect the work to continue for the next week or so. Due to recent global events, progress on various binary distribution channels that ASF controls is slow, but it is still on my radar.
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're down 2 (to 20), unresolved issues this month. Henri Yandell has indicated that he may want to step in to replace Mark Struberg as VP Jakarta EE Relations. With renewed involvement, hopefully we can finalize discussions with the Eclipse Foundation. Due to recent global events, progress on various binary distribution channels that ASF controls is slow, but it is still on my radar. DLA Piper started to review our by-laws. We reviewed (and approved with modifications) an Associated Partner contract text from the KNX Association (LEGAL-509) and also Bylaws of the OPC Foundation (LEGAL-508).
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're up 1 (to 22), unresolved issues this month. John D. Ament has indicated that he may want to step in to replace Mark Struberg as VP Jakarta EE Relations. With renewed involvement, hopefully we can finalize discussions with the Eclipse Foundation We were contacted by Technology Enforcement Division (Bureau of Competition) from the Federal Trade Commission of the United States Government and offered to participate in a study of "market participants" in the cloud services industry. We had to decline on account that we are not, in fact, a market participant. I started collecting background information on various binary distribution channels that ASF controls in preparation for a more comprehensive discussion on the subject.
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're down 3 (to 21), unresolved issues this month. I tried to contact VP Jakarta EE Relations (Mark Struberg) but failed to get a response. I will be proposing that we start an official search for a replacement on members@ (it also, unfortunately, means there has been no progress with Eclipse foundation so far). We had a good discussion about clarifying some of the patent implications around Apache License v2 and ultimately decided to refrain from updating the FAQ. There was a discussion around updating the appendix of the canonical Apache License v2 text with the guidelines around the text of the licensing itself and how the use of "Apache License" brand needs to be respected if the text of the license gets amended/updated. Ultimately the decision is to go with the documentation update for now and let the canonical text of the license stay as it is.
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're up 4 to 24, unresolved issues this month. Sadly, there has been no progress with Eclipse foundation mainly because lack of time on our end with key volunteers (Roman and Mark Struberg) we will try to do better next month. I had a call with Qualcomm clarifying some of the ramifications of the patent clause in the Apache License. Based on the discussion, I'll be proposing additions to our legal FAQ soon.
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're dow 2 to 20, unresolved issues this month. Sadly, there has been no progress with Eclipse foundation mainly because lack of time on our end with key volunteers (Roman and Mark Struberg) we will try to do better next month. Two noteworthy discussions are around LEGAL-488 and LEGAL-489 where we are trying to figure out how to help NetBeans community in particular (and anyone in business of build end-to-end end-user facing project at ASF be able to ship their binaries based on modularization framework available in modern JREs).
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're slightly up 2 to 22, unresolved issues this month. Our work with Eclipse foundation continues mainly around formalizing our current relationship, but also discovery of prior ASF participation in JSR Expert Group. See VP Jakarta report for more details. This month Mark Struberg indicated that he has been able to commit to coming up with a proposal on next steps. This is understandable given the volunteer nature of our committee, but it does make Eclipse Foundation a tad frustrated with ASF. We will keep an eye on the situation and hopefully will resolve it in the coming month. We handled two spurious DMCA takedown notices (the originating legal counsel was confused about relationship between ASF and how its products are used by 3d parties). We reviewed and approved contract for the D&I committee between ASF and Bitergia. We clarified SLA expectations of the Committee over at https://www.apache.org/legal/#communications
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're down 2 to 20, unresolved issues this month. Our work with Eclipse foundation continues mainly around formalizing our current relationship, but also discovery of prior ASF participation in JSR Expert Group. See VP Jakarta report for more details. Senior Vice President, Intellectual Property at one of the corporate contributors to a major ASF project reached out for clarifications on early (pre 2009) contributions to a few ASF projects and we've provided required guidance. At ApacheCON in Las Vegas we met with a few ASF sponsors during a scheduled luncheon and answered their questions around IP management and licensing policies within ASF. We also discussed potential opportunities and challenges for new projects coming into the incubator.
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're down 1 to 22, unresolved issues this month. We have finally submitted Legal sections of the ASF annual report. We have finalized our recommendations for how ASF may decide to engage with Eclipse Jakarta EE Platform. We continue to evaluate additional options for counsel to augment the work of DLA Piper. We expect to have an update on this in a month or two. Mishi Choudhary from SFLC is looking into refreshing the relationship with us. In additional to that we also had Cliff Allen reaching out offering his help.
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. We're up 3 to 23, unresolved issues this month. We have received our first official DMCA takedown notice and acted accordingly. The party who submitted the notice considers matter to be resolved now. The material that had to be taken down consisted of 3 emails available via mail-archives.apache.org. We are currently in the process of formalizing a check-list/policy of actions to be taken should the next DMCA takedown notice arrive. We have provided guidance to the Incubator PMC around relaxing release policy for podlings. We are continue the work with Jakarta EE VP around implications of Eclipse Foundation Jakarta EE paperwork. We continue to evaluate additional options for counsel to augment the work of DLA Piper. We expect to have an update on this in a month or two. Mishi Choudhary from SFLC is looking into refreshing the relationship with us. In additional to that we also had Cliff Allen reaching out offering his help. Legal section of the ASF yearly report has been submitted to Sally
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. (we're steady at 20, unresolved issues this month). We have worked with DLA Piper and Linux foundation on formulating our official position around DoC's Huawei Entity List ruling: https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/statement-by-the-apache-software and also greatly clarified our our EAR page: https://www.apache.org/licenses/exports/ We've completed review of the JetBrains sponsorship agreement and clarified the implications of JetBrains licensing to committers@. Thanks to Hen we now have our official P&C mailing list setup. The subscribers are strictly limited to: * board-private@apache.org (which is limited to the 9 board members) * All active ASF counsel (Mark Radcliffe currently, unless we determine SFLC are still active) * ASF Legal VP, ASF Data Privacy VP, ASF Assistant Legal VP We have completed the legal review of the Eclipse Foundation Jakarta paperwork and expect to hand it over to Jakarta VP once Mark is approved for his role this month. We started to evaluate additional options for counsel to augment the work of DLA Piper. We expect to have an update on this in a month or two. Mishi Choudhary from SFLC is looking into refreshing the relationship with us. In additional to that we also had Cliff Allen reaching out offering his help. We expected to make more progress on evaluating these individuals and/or organizations, but unfortunately the ammount of urgent activity this month prevented us from making progress.
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took good care of resolving most of these in time. (we're down 4, from 24 to 20, open issues this month). Thanks to Hen we're closing the loop on rationalizing our mailing lists infrastructure and are about to create our P&C list. We're at the final stretch with reviewing JetBrains sponsorship agreement and should have a final signoff from DLA Piper by the end of this week. Jakarta VP discussion is going on and when the VP Jakarta role is created whoever ends up in that role will be signing the agreement with Eclipse Foundation. We started to evaluate additional options for counsel to augment the work of DLA Piper. We expect to have an update on this in a month or two. Mishi Choudhary from SFLC is looking into refreshing the relationship with us. We had Facebook and Uber reach out to us for help with detailed understanding of our licensing practices. The meetings are being set up and we will report back on the result.
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. (we're down 5, from 24 to 19, open issues this month). We approved Jakarta TCK contracts that would allow ASF to officially join Eclipse Foundation activities around Eclipse Jakarta EE Platform. Hen continued with his updates/clarifications on the website overhauling the overall menu systems for the legal matters. Discussion around clarifying the scope and purpose of legal mailing lists and also creating a privileged mailing list re-surfaced again. This time we have much more consensus at least around how to proceed with privileged one. We reviewed DataStax sponsorship agreement for ApacheCon and in general started to question how deep into contract reviews should Legal Affairs committee really go (remember: we're NOT trained lawyers).
For the past months we've had a regular amount of usual requests flowing through LEGAL JIRA and legal-discuss. Hen and the rest of the volunteers took a good care of resolving most of these in time. (we're down 4, from 28 to 24, open issues this month). Kudos to Hen for leading a few cleanup/clarifications efforts, most notably in private/foundation/legal SVN and web properties of legal committee available under https://www.apache.org/legal Also, Hen contributed quite a bit to the 5 year plan with details available at: https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/LEGAL/issues/LEGAL-422 Discussions around evolving our binary release policies continued on legal-discuss and general@incubator with several data points for a potential proposal emerging, but with no clear indication for how and when the process will converge. This may require a board level feedback on how important it is for us to spend significant resources on pursuing this. Discussion around clarifying the scope and purpose of legal mailing lists and also creating a privileged mailing list re-surfaced again. This time we have much more consensus at least around how to proceed with privileged one. We finalizing publishing of our IRS filings for the 2016/2017 as per request of Martin Michlmayr. It is now available under: https://www.apache.org/foundation/records/
We've had a lot of discussion on legal-discuss and general@incubator converging the topic of projects publishing software outside of Apache infrastructure. We don't believe this is currently clear. JIRA issues continue to move along (we're down 4, from 28 to 24, open issues this month). Henri has offered up some initial brainstorming on our part of the 5 year plan, the board are very welcome to offer their own thoughts: https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/LEGAL/issues/LEGAL-422 Martin Michlmayr reported that we have not published our IRS filings since the 2015/2016 year. Roman has acquired the PDF for the latest filing and is about to publish it (with ample heads up given to the rest of the board members in the past few weeks).
Legal Affairs committee for the past month has been mostly business as usual with an average number of LEGAL jiras coming in and requiring our attention. Assistant V.P., Legal Affairs and other members of a legal committee have been doing excellent job at triaging legal JIRAs and making sure we make progress on addressing our backlog. We are currently at 28 open (compared to 24 last month) JIRAs with the oldest dating back to Jan 2017. While we seem to be keeping on top of day-to-day issues that come up, it must be noted that JIRA count is creeping a bit up and a few things that were expected to be resolved in the month of December and put to rest (e.g. mailing list structure, binary releases and CCLAs) are still lingering. Hopefully the month of January will see us getting a few of those across the finish line (I hope to have a bit more time available to dedicate to making a dent in those).
Legal Affairs committee for the past month has been mostly business as usual with an average number of LEGAL jiras coming in and requiring our attention. Assistant V.P., Legal Affairs and other members of a legal committee have been doing excellent job at triaging legal JIRAs and making sure we make progress on addressing our backlog. We are currently at 24 open (compared to 22 last month) JIRAs with the oldest dating back to Jan 2017. VP Brand Management did a really great job keeping committee posted on latest developments around Common Clause and also keeping our pro-bono counsel in the loop. There's currently no updates to be shared aside from what is already reflected on: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-402 There's been an active discussion among Legal Committee members about what configuration of mailing lists and aliases which would best satisfy the goal of rigorously upholding attorney client privilege. Consensus on the best course of action has not yet emerged. Another useful discussion around official status of convenience binary releases in the foundation appears to have converged and we hope to suggest documentation updates based on its results.
I would like to request board's attention on the CCLA discussion that's been simmering for a month or so now. There are no other issues that require board attention at the moment. Legal Affairs committee for the past month has been mostly business as usual with an average number of LEGAL jiras coming in and requiring our attention. Once again, Assistant V.P., Legal Affairs has been doing excellent job at triaging legal JIRAs and making sure we make progress on addressing our backlog. We are currently at 22 open JIRAs with the oldest dating back to Jan 2017. Mark Radcliffe arranged for a meeting with the Intellectual Property Counsel of a major US corporation that was focused on educating them on the evolution of Apache License and general ASF's policies around patent trolling. I've been approached by members of the Silicon Valley VC community involved in Common Clause discussions seeking to build more of a relationship with ASF. The initial conversation went well and I expect them to follow up on a legal-discuss mailing list.
There are currently no known legal issues that would require board's attention. The transition from Chris to Roman & Henry has been completed this month with Henry driving much needed work on grooming the backlog of the LEGAL JIRAs and working on the ones that started to get a little stale. As part of the transition we had a con call with Mark Radcliffe and David Gross from DLA Piper with Roman and Chris present from the ASF side. Mark mostly elaborated on the current state of things but also reiterated a few points that resulted in legal-discuss thread around ICLA vs CCLA policies. We see usual amount (roughly a couple per week) of Q&A happening on the legal mailing list and LEGAL jira. Roman and Henri have been assigned to lead "ASF Services - Legal" section in the 5 years plan.
We're moving ahead with the plan proposed last month: 1. Create an Assistant VP, Legal position and nominate Henri Yandell to this position. 2. Appoint Roman Shaposhnik to a position of Vice President, Legal Affairs Both resolutions have been submitted as separate items for the board consideration. Huge kudos go to Chris for ensuring smooth transition and making himself available until the end of 2018. We see usual amount (roughly a couple per week) of Q&A happening on the legal mailing list and LEGAL jira. All of these are being handled with great support from Hen Yandell and others on the Legal discuss list. Chris is still working with VP, Infra and the office of Data Privacy to draft a data privacy plan and set of updates to the ASF mailing list archival removal policy owned by the infra team. The only big in-bound item requiring us to formulate an externally visible response this month is a request from a European Commission in a Case M.8994 "MICROSOFT / GITHUB" This is being handled in a timely manner but may require involvement of our legal counsel.
This month I am announcing a transition plan that will round out this calendar year. I have been in discussion with two ASF members both of which are interested in transitioning to the VP, Legal role, and both members of the Legal Committee. I suggest to the Board the following plan of action: 1. Create an Assistant VP, Legal position. Just as we have an Assistant Secretary, Legal issues are rising to the point where having a named Assistant VP just makes sense to me and there is definitely interest. 2. The person I am considering nominating for Board consideration for VP, Legal becomes available near the end of the calendar year. I recommend appointing Assistant VP, Legal before then, at next month's meeting, and then ensuring a smooth transition by replacing me in the December 2018 board meeting with my successor. Outside of the above, legal questions are getting answers due to an influx of great support from Hen Yandell and others on the Legal discuss list. Besides that, VP, Legal is working with VP, Infra and the office of Data Privacy to draft a data privacy plan and set of updates to the ASF mailing list archival removal policy owned by the infra team. We are not done yet, though some progress will be reported in the VP, Data Privacy report this month.
The traditional legal questions are continuing to be answered on legal-discuss primarily by members of the community and Legal Committee. These include questions surrounding what licenses projects can use; how documentation can be licensed, and so forth. A big theme over the past month e.g., see LEGAL-383 [1] for an example, is to have legal input on constructing a data privacy policy for GDPR. VP, Infra has been involved and we are working with DLA piper and over the last week I received a long set of privileged guidance that I need to share with VP, Infra regarding the next steps to take in creating Apache's privacy policy. What became clear is that the creation of such a policy both a) should not be limited to GDPR, and likely applies to DCMA and other related privacy concerns; b) the process is in its own right a separate body of work from strictly legal concerns; and c) it makes sense to create an officer position responsible for managing this in tracking with industry, academia, and other non-profits where data privacy is a big deal. The result is a resolution for Board consideration to create a separate VP, Data Privacy officer position reporting to the Board to manage our strategy. Initially Chris, our current VP, Legal is proposed to staff it, but a replacement will be recruited and presented for consideration before the end of the CY. In the meanwhile, Legal, Infra, and data privacy will work hand in hand to deliver the ASF's policy in this area. [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-383
VP, Infra has provided a draft policy for GDPR that we are currently reviewing. Progress has been slow but I expect in the next month or two to get something finalized and posted regarding it. Most of the policy shifts the operational day to day to infra, and appoints VP, Legal as a Data Privacy officer for strategic review. Given this, and also our DMCA policy which is extremely similar, I approached the Board privately about considering the appointment of a VP, Data Privacy, initially staffed by VP, Legal (me), but after six months, staffed by a new volunteer, providing an opportunity for growth. It makes sense during this time and I am willing to commit to doing so, but after six months I won't be able to fulfill both positions and during that time, considering the wealth of people chiming in w.r.t things like GDPR and other issues, I think finding such a volunteer would not prove difficult. So, I specifically request that the Board consider this officer appointment publicly in next month's meeting - based on private positive feedback so far. Discussions on the legal-discuss list are consistently answered in a timely fashion, mostly by other contributors to the committee and the list.
Overall a very quiet month. The Legal Affairs committee responded to an inquiry from the Infrastructure administrator regarding allowing the capability of PMCs to set the repo:status information in GitHub through our GitBox tooling. Legal saw no issue with this. A discussion surrounding examples of components that have undergone relicensing from GPL to ALv2 was run to ground with useful help from various members of the legal committee to the inquirer.
A question arose about the redistribution of OpenJDK in Apache projects. Legal committee members and others on the mailing list provided advice advising that doing so violates Apache legal policy regarding Category-X dependencies. The project was informed and moved forward and will not be redistributing OpenJDK. A handful of questions about the EU’s GDPR initiative arose including one from our VP, Infra. After discussions, VP Legal and VP Infra agreed that VP, Infra will draft a short policy document, and then review with VP, Legal and eventually post that policy on a public Apache web page. Likely we will employ a similar tactic as we do with DCMA policy by having a “registered agent” concept. A discussion surrounding whether a modified version of the Apache license is still “the Apache license” arose, and guidance was provided that modifications to the license, along with naming rights for the license, necessitate changing the license name if modifying it. Questions surrounding Software Grants and associated materials provided with them continue to be ongoing with ASF Secretary and ASF projects. VP, Legal has Referred the matter to the ASF Secretary for resolution.
Despite my original intention to step down, I had a change of heart and desire to continue as VP, Legal for the near future. I will be looking over the next 6-12 months for an appropriate candidate if one emerges to train in the role so there is a smooth transition when the time is right. Thanks to those who sent words of encouragement to continue on. Not a busy month but there were a handful of issues to report on. In LEGAL-363 [1] we are disussing the use of CC-BY-4.0 HTML and CSS in Example code. Discussions are ongoing, but based on precedent this will likely be disallowed. A question surrounding ASF, copyleft and container images, includes ongoing discussion about the ability for projects to publish "official" Apache container releases. Guidance from Legal at this point is that the ASF only releases source code, and our policy officially covers that. However, the ASF does allow for binary or "convenience" artifacts, as unofficial artifacts released by the PMC. It would seem that Docker containers fall into this area, and so Legal is unlikely to provide any specific approvals, etc., and we do not see this as outside of the existing approach to dealing with binary / convenience artifacts. Guidance was provided to check with infra regarding the ability to publish to DockerHub. The committee answered a question regarding an external project already licensed under the ALv2 and whether it made sense to a) fork the project; and b) if so, bring the project into the ASF via the Incubator. Legal committee recommended that the upstream project determine the situation surrounding the copyright for the existing code first before continuing the discussion surrounding Apache incubation. The resolution was provided in LEGAL-367 [2]. Discussion is ongoing in reference to the inclusion of documentation produced by the Open Grid Forum (OGF) within an Apache project. The documentation is licensed using the OGF license. The discussion in LEGAL-369 [3] led to the creation of LEGAL-372 [4] in which their is a request to categorize the OGF license. That classification is critical to determine how to proceed in LEGAL-369. One of our podlings requested a definitive ruling regarding the necssity of including a list of 3rd party dependencies accompanying software grants from upstream IP holders. Legal does not believe these are required, though in the recent past, a company did provide such a list along with a grant, and Legal saw no problem with its inclusion. However, the ASF secretary and the podling mentors for the project in question do not believe that the list is a requirement - and Legal agrees. The discussion is close to resolution in LEGAL-374 [5]. Finally, a question was quickly answered regarding the use of Jetty in Apache projects in LEGAL-375 [6]. [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-363 [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-367 [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-369 [4] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-372 [5] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-374 [6] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-375
A question regarding the Java Unit of Measure specification JSR-275 version 0.9.3 arose since it was used in versions of two ASF projects: Tika and SIS. In reading the license for the project, a determination was made that the dependency is Category-X as described in LEGAL-360 [1]. As described in the issue, newer versions of SIS use the BSD licensed version of this dependency, and Tika's master branch now uses this as well. As far as the committee is concerned, this issue is resolved. The Category-X list on the Legal/Resolved page should be updated by the meeting or shortly thereafter to reflect this. In LEGAL-363 [2] a committee proposes to use CC-BY-4.0 HTML and CSS in example code. A contributor correctly noted that CC-BY-4.0 is Category-B. Discussion is ongoing with the latest note regarding inclusion in binary form being acceptable if the HTML and CSS can be packaged that way. A series of discussions regarding the role of Trademarks and Brand as they relate to the Legal committee occured as part of the Five Year vision Board discussion that is ongoing, related to the 5 year budget planning activity. These discussions led to a number of specific actions taking place. First, a resolution was dicussed and originally posted in this agenda for consideration by the Board that made clear that the Legal committee should be the only committee interacting with our counsel at the ASF. There were a few concerns related to the resolution and it became clear that its inclusion at this point in time was premature. The Legal Committee recommends that the Board make clear at some future date either the explicit delegation of Legal authority to speak with counsel to the Brand committee (and its role in Trademarks) or identify that in fact Brand (and Trademarks) is part of Legal overall. As part of this discovery process into the relationship between Legal and Brand/Trademarks, VP, Legal met with two lawyers - one external offering (potentially volunteer) help - and also a meeting with our pro bono counsel to receive recommendations about managing our Trademark portfolio. Both of these meetings generated quite a bit of notes which were summarized and passed along to trademarks@, operations@ and board@. Please note a resolution to cull the members of the Legal Affairs committee to those that responded to my opt-in request earlier to legal-internal@ and to those actively participating. I am also proposing to add Shane Curcuru and Mark Thomas to the committee - both - as members of the Brand Committee and Trademarks are involved in Legal issues and having them vested as full members of the Legal committee makes sense in this regard. I have consulted with both of them prior to including the resolution. Finally, I am making the announcement that I will be stepping down from the position of VP, Legal after the upcoming Apache members meeting. Thank you for the opportunity to be VP Legal. I plan on filing one last report last month before officially resigning. [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-360 [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-363
The monthly was pretty quiet, as expected since it included the Winter holidays for many. Discussion surrounding ECCNs for Cassandra and Kafka was initiated in LEGAL-358 [1]. Apparently the page for a.o/licenses/exports/ did not include entries for those projects. So far the Apache Cassandra PMC has responded with the required updates to the page but we are still waiting for the Apache Kafka PMC to reply. David Nalley suggested we may want to revisit our policies for recording ECCNs. Legal advises the Board that the relevant committee (Security? Infra?) may want to consider this. A question regarding commercial use and attribution of ASF software was raised and replied to by members of the Legal committee and list. Two active threads regarding the proper location of attributions and notices (LICENSE or NOTICE files) continues on the legal-discuss list. No definitive conclusions have been arrived at, but the discussions have proven quite valuable to those participating. [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-358
Over the last month, activity slowed down a bit. The Committee provided guidance regarding how best to include Apache license headers in source code repositories, as explained in LEGAL-346 [1]. A contributor brought a question to the Legal PMC regarding whether or not UML models may themselves be produced under the ALv2. The committee provided guidance that ALv2 is allowed not just for code, but for data and models as well, as indicated in LEGAL-351 [2]. An ASF project was concerned about the use of a dependency licensed under the JSON-lib license, and per guidance provided in the cited thread (LEGAL-349 [3]), the project decided that the particular dependency needed to be replaced with an alternative. Another dependency related question, this time whether or not a dependency licensed under BSD-3 with nuclear clause could be distributed along with an Apache project was resolved in LEGAL-304 [4]. The EPL 2.0 license was added to Category-B in LEGAL-335 [5]. [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-346 [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-351 [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-349 [4] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-304 [5] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-335
The month began with discussion surrounding fair use of files used in our projects, e.g., open image files, or scans of text from the web. Though no broad policy updates emerged, the parties in discussion received the feedback needed from the Legal committee to move on with their efforts as described in LEGAL-331 [1] and LEGAL-332 [2]. A new top level project (TLP) wanted Legal's opinion in the construction of its new website as to whether or not design files licensed commercially (and not under the ALv2) would affect their use on the website. Legal provided guidance that this was acceptable in this specific case, but further requests similar to this would need to be evaluated on their own merits. More information on the discussion can be found in [3] and in LEGAL-341 [4]. An ASF and Legal Committee member raised discussion surrounding replacing our CLA with DCO+ALv2 as described in [5]. Several other members chimed in and the overall consensus was that our ICLAs are working out just fine since they are a direct pre-requisite to having ASF accounts and thus there is a community benefit of having an ICLA on file should contributors be invited as committers or PMC members to ASF projects. The question of what metrics can be recorded in ASF projects w.r.t. downloads and user information related to them incepted a spirited discussion. Pointers were made to infra policy and infra members including the Infra Admin provided guidance in the thread. [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-331 [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-332 [3] https://s.apache.org/YwMN [4] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-341 [5] https://s.apache.org/0NzX
This month, I began an effort to cull membership to our legal-internal list which was at 84 members, and is currently at 15 members. The criteria for inclusion in the culling was that the membership of the list consist of the Legal PMC, Legal VP, our pro bono counsel, and the criteria was expanded to include ASF directors & officers who “opted in”, and three ASF members who had been longtime Legal contributors who requested to opt-in as well. Shortly after the last Board meeting on 9/22/17, Facebook made a decision to relicense the React.js framework to the MIT license [1]. This opened up the ability for its inclusion in Apache projects. In particular, the initial LEGAL-319 [2] issue raised by Joan Touzet for the use of React in the Apache CouchDB project and moreover for all Apache projects was resolved and the library can be used with React version 16+. There were questions surrounding the ability to import the entire VCS history of donated software that was previously licensed under GPLv3, per LEGAL-331 [3]. Per the discussion in that issue, there is not a problem with importing that history, however, the important thing is to go through the provenance of the code once Imported, and make sure that the code that the PMC releases complies with our legal and release policies and dependency guidance per the legal/resolved page. A side issue arose out of this discussion relating to whether or not images included in said prior VCS history that were imported were useable under fair use, as specified in LEGAL-332 [4]. The answer to that question per Legal policy is that such use is disallowed as outlined in the comments of LEGAL-332. A spirited discussion was raised regarding the terms of use of the Central repository and whether they were incompatible with the Apache License, version 2 [5]. The recommendation from Legal is that the ASF does not have concerns about PMCs using the Central repo as an unofficial distribution channel relating to ASF products. Any concerns about the use of downstream unofficial distribution channels for ASF code should be brought up with the owners of those channels specifically. The Universal Permissive License 1.0 was added to the Category A list [6]. [1] https://s.apache.org/1XaT [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-319 [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-331 [4] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-332 [5] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-333 [6] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-326
Facebook decided against changing the license of the React.js framework [1] and as such React.js is not useable in any Apache projects per Legal's original guidance and transition period. Projects should have no dependencies on React.js. Questions should be directed to legal-discuss@ and/or to the LEGAL JIRA system [2]. Eclipse released the Eclipse Public License v2.0, and a discussion thread was raised wondering whether Apache legal had any comment. At this point in time, there are no comments, and there has not be a classification of EPLv2.0 in the Apache legal/resolved.html classification system. There was some confusion regarding a software grant from an external company regarding an explicit list of third party dependencies identified in the regular grant form. Confusion about the grant, and information about the project is described in LEGAL-327 [3]. The resolution to this issue was that Legal told the project to go ahead and accept the software grant and then in the future to work with the upstream donating entity to remove such information from future grants. Additional conversation surrounding LEGAL-327 and Legal's role in Incubator software grants, etc., led to the development and addition of information on the Whimsy Roster Chart for VP, Legal [4]. The additional information describes the process for interacting with VP Legal, our Pro Bono Counsel and the mailing lists surrounding them. Other traditional legal questions (about whether License X can be included in project Y, etc.) are being answered slowly and usually in the order received. [1] https://s.apache.org/k3Aj [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-327 [4] https://whimsy.apache.org/roster/orgchart/vp-legal
A handful of issues highlight the report this month. First, Facebook changed the license on RocksDB to dual-licensed ALv2 and GPLv2 [1]. As such Legal has updated the Legal/resolved page [2] to reflect this. Despite this specific reclassification for RocksDB, many Facebook developed projects are still licensed under the BSD+patents license, and as such several ASF projects using Facebook dependencies such as BigTop have questions related to the Facebook BSD+patents license Category-X classification. For example, BigTop was concerned about packaging code that was licensed under BSD+patents. Legal's recommendation is not to include such code in Apache products as described in LEGAL-322 [3]. The discussion on RocksDB evolved into a discussion of another popular webapp framework developed by Facebook, ReactJS [4]. Several ASF projects use React including (but not limited to), CouchDB, Superset (in the Incubator [5]), and other projects. If ReactJS continues under the BSD+patents license, Legal's opinion has not changed, and the license itself is now disallowed in ASF projects. There is an open GitHub issue and ongoing discussion at Facebook considering changing the license [4] initially driven by a question from one of the Apache CouchDB PMC members. In other news, VP Legal has agreed to take on a role as DCMA agent for the ASF as described in LEGAL-164 [6]. Other major discussion was surrounding if binary artifacts are officially part of a release, as asked in LEGAL-323 [7]. Clarification from Legal is that source code is the only artifact that is actually released by a PMC, and that existing requirements as specified on [1] are sufficient, so documentation will not be updated. A question asking for confirmation that 4-clause BSD being is in category-X was confirmed. [1] https://s.apache.org/XWzg [2] https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-322 [4] https://s.apache.org/yFHp [5] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-320 [6] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-164 [7] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-323
The top level item to report this month is the movement of Facebook's BSD+patents license to Category-X as documented in LEGAL-303 [1]. We provided a similar transition period as was given during the JSON license decision arrived at earlier. The decision has caused much discussion on Reddit, Hacker News, and there have been a handful of news articles published about it. Legal requests that discussion occur on the legal-discuss@a.o list for any follow-ups and there have been a few already (e.g., from Hadoop, and other projects). Other legal questions are being answered as quickly as possible. There have been a few decisions related to the use of data to train models in Apache projects. In LEGAL-313 [2], we decided to disallow use of the Amazon Fine Food Reviews Dataset in Apache Projects, whereas in LEGAL-309 [3] we decided to allow use of the Universal Dependencies (UD) datasets to train models for Apache OpenNLP whereas in LEGAL-317 [4] we affirmed prior discussion that OntoNotes corpus data and LDC data are not useable in Apache projects. Ongoing discussion also revolves around the use of system dependencies, e.g., autoconf generated header files as in LEGAL-300 [5], and header files licensed under LGPL in LEGAL-316 [6]. Another question raised this month is Legal's opinion on the collection of usage statistics during running/execution of ASF products, e.g., collecting anonymous usage data when code is running. Discussion is ongoing. In LEGAL-164 [7] the issue of Apache deriving a DCMA Safe Harbor policy was revisited by Kevin McGrail. Discussion is ongoing. [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-303 [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-313 [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-309 [4] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-317 [5] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-300 [6] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-316 [7] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-164
There have been a variety of license related questions, some policy related questions that added a license to Category-X on our resolved page, an issue related to a separate project on Github using a license it dubbed "Modified Apache 2.0 License", and an issue related to whether or not a project is able to use training data licensed under various licenses to produce new ALv2 NLP models trained on that data. There were also questions regarding if an ASF project could build code generation tools that were used to generate non ALv2 and/or permissively licensed code (e.g., GPL). And finally there was a question regarding using sample data licensed under CC0 / Public Domain as unit testing/acceptance testing data in one of our projects. In addition, there was a request from the IPMC to absolve it from the requirement of performing/managing IP clearances for projects. Legal has decided that the IPMC is the correct place for these clearances to continue. In the past month, the grace period for removing software using the JSON license from Apache products has expired, and Legal notified PMCs of this expiration. A PMC was found to be rerouting release oriented user data to an external third party site. The ASF Infra Admin and infra stepped in, along with others to rectify this situation by the ASF taking control of the third party site domain, and working with the PMC to make sure everything is happening on ASF servers. Legal has no concerns with this resolution. Legal is proposing the addition of a new member to its committee via resolution. More information on relevant tickets to this report is provided below. * LEGAL-303 RocksDB Integrations * LEGAL-313 Use of CC0: Public Domain License data * LEGAL-310 Handling of IP Clearance for non-incubating projects * Re: JRuby bundling LGPL prior to version 9.1.9.0
No report was submitted.
The business of addressing straightforward licensing inquiries continues as usual. It may be time to review our ECCN procedures. Some inquiries have gone unanswered and some out-of-date documentation has been flagged.
After considerable debate, the ACE license has been added to "Category A". It is a BSD-style license with extra verbiage describing the ACE project's history; no concerns have been voiced that the extra verbiage materially changes the meaning of the license. An earlier recommendation resolving a complex licensing issue with the Incubator podling MADlib was reaffirmed.
Some discussions regarding whether or not a project can depend on a codebase with a non-OSI/FSF approved license currently not in the Cat-A classification. My opinion is that we want our software to be used and consumed with as little fuss and muss as possible, and a dependency on a non-OSI approved license is a detriment to that philosophy. Also, it implies that the ASF is in the business of determining what is, and is not, OSD compliant. My point in that regard is that that is NOT the ASF's job; it is clearly one of the key functions of OSI, and always has been. This is somewhat of a "hard-line" approach, and the board should be aware of this. It appears that this is not a popular point-of-view and that others disagree. I cannot in good conscious agree with a decision and an action in which we, basically, become authorities on what does and what does not comply with the OSD. As such, I tender my resignation and ask the board to assign a replacement at this meeting.
Our reclassification of the JSON License to CatX received quite a bit of external notice, from entries on LWN to Richard Fontana's "7 notable legal developments" article[1]. Nothing requiring board attention at this time. 1. https://opensource.com/article/17/1/yearbook-7-notable-legal-developments-2016
Clarification and decision on JSON License, with mandate provided to projects regarding usage of said artifacts. No other issues requiring board attention.
During the last month, 2 items of note were discussed and resolved. First was the categorization of the JSON "Don't Be Evil" license and the other was related to the NetBeans Incubation Proposal. Regarding the former, it was decided that the JSON license, not, by definition, being an "open source license" (since it is not approved by OSI) is, in fact, CatX. Regarding the latter, the difference between hard and soft depedencies were further clarified. No issues requiring board attention.
Nothing requiring board attention at this time.
Kudos to Henri Yandell for working towards clearing out the Legal JIRA issues. Some clarifications regarding SGAs, CCLAs and iCLAS but otherwise nothing of further significance to report. Nothing requiring board attention at this time.
Nothing requiring board attention at this time.
There has been an ongoing discussion regarding the usage of Github repos as the "official" source of ASF project codebases (source code), and the requirements, conditions, issues and concerns there-of. Speaking as the VP of Legal Affairs, I am quite happy with how this is handled via the MATT "experiment", but there is concern that this is not sufficient (ie: projects are not quite satisfied with it and would prefer the unfiltered and unencumbered full Github process) as well as the "costs" of supporting this effort as it relates to Infra- structure resources. We have also been made aware of an external patent troll case which is related to one of our projects; The PMC has been contacted but, as of this date, no response has been forth-coming. I plan to bug them again this week. At present there are no issues requiring board attention.
Some discussions regarding license compatibility, specifically related to OpenSSL dependency, and the official release process. No issues requiring board attention.
Nothing to report this month.
JIRA issues continue to be addressed with support from the entire team. I have had some emails related to questions about our iCLAs and CCLAs regarding clarification of intent. Have had issues related to scheduling for one specific entity to address their questions and concerns. No issues requiring board attention.
Confirmed with counsel that our bylaws, and our usage and interpretation regarding majority, are correct and require no change. Specifically, Section 3.9 of the bylaws tracks the relevant Delaware law (Section 215). The bylaws take the traditional approach to voting that once you have a quorum, the action of the members is determined by a vote of the members present. For example, a "majority" is a majority of votes cast (where one can ignore Abstain, ie: "more Yes than No"). 2/3rds is handled the same way. Once we have a quorum, the action *of the quorum* is an action of the membership. There are no issues requiring board attention.
Contacted legal counsel regarding bylaws clarification and possible editing, if required; currently still in process. No issues requiring board attention at this time.
Relatively slow month. Some minor questions asked and answered on the legal lists. Currently working a just-recently-discovered license non- compliance issue related to a fork of one of our projects. Our pro-bono counsel has been contacted regarding review of our bylaws, and proposed changes (if necessary) to clarify how to apply "two-thirds majority" when counting votes. As a reminder, currently we use the 'two thirds of cast votes' majority interpretation.
As noted in last month's report, the official ASF release policy was
ratified and published, and can be found at:
https://www.apache.org/legal/release-policy.html
Thanks to all who helped.
On a non-legal list, someone asked about the possibility of submitting
a modified SGA. They were asked to refer the question to the legal lists
but, as of this writing, I have not seen the query.
There are no items requiring board attention.
A busy month for me personally, which has affected the timing of
some Legal Affairs items. Of primary importance is that I am
letting the board know that post-meeting, my plan is to officially
accept the draft release policy (http://www.apache.org/dev/release-draft.html).
I also anticipate increased legal activity around the proposed
version control policy as well.
We received a request for immediate takedown of an email message on
one of the Tomcat mailing lists; it was not approved since it does not
fall within the exceptional circumstances criteria in:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/public-archives.html
We also received another subpoena this month, this one directed to Ross
and related to "Data Engine Technologies LLC vs IBM" (6:13-cv-00859-LED).
A copy of the above was provided to Ross. I am awaiting direction from Ross
on how he wishes to respond.
A formal ASF Release Policy has been drafted and it is in the process of being reviewed. My expectation is to make it official within a month's timeframe. Many thanks to Marvin Humphrey for his work in this effort. JIRA tickets continue to be closed. I will be working with our legal counsel regarding the proposed Bylaws update regarding the 2/3rds majority question. No issues requiring board attention.
A formal ASF Release Policy has been drafted; it is in the process of being reviewed. In addition, clarification on the ASF's non-release licensing policy has also been discussed and clarified on the legal-discuss@ mailing list. JIRA tickets continue to be closed. Our legal council was engaged to help us with drafting a set of emails; the pertinent matter has since been closed. No issues requiring board attention.
Will provide a verbal report.
Nothing requiring board attention.
An active month, as measured by mailing list and JIRA activity, but nothing that requires board attention or action at this time.
JIRA issues continue to be tracked and closed as appropriate; special thanks goes to Henri Yandell. Some discussions but nothing requiring board attention at this time.
The draft of the privacy policy is still being reviewed; the DMCA policy is (still) being drafted. Numerous JIRA items have been closed. A dis- cussion regarding online submission of (i)CLAs has started, in cooperation with the Operations team. The question of whether or not the ASF could use Github as the canonical and official repo for any ASF project was asked: the decision of VP Legal is that the unavailability of the push logs from Github results in an increased risk to our developers and end-users, and would make the consumption of, or leverage of, ASF projects by end-users a more difficult proposition due to the ASF not being able to completely and independently verify and perform the required IP provenance of our released code. A blog post and/or JIRA ticket, to further make this policy decision more known, is likely. No issues requiring board attention at this time.
There has been some discussion regarding adding a formal DMCA and privacy policy to complement our existing mailing list policy. A draft of the privacy policy is available and is being reviewed, and a DMCA policy is being drafted. No issues requiring board attention at this time.
The ASF was subpoenaed to provide documents and testimony related to U.S. Patent No. 6,691,302. I provided URLs for our mailing list archive and our release archive and provided testimony related to our release guidelines and procedures, especially as related to Apache httpd, mod_perl and ApacheJserv. No items requiring board attention at this time.
There was some discussion regarding cleaning-up our external documentation, regarding 3rd party license capability and ensuring that people are directed to the latest official policies; This effort is in the process of being completed. JIRA-based issues are being handled as required. Nothing at this time for board action.
I presented at the Practicing Law Institute (PLI) last week during their "Open Source" training session; my topic was related to open source communities. There were also other topics regarding patents, ethics, etc that were useful and interesting. Nothing at this time for board action.
A few questions regarding usage of the Apache iCLA and external licenses were asked and answered. I will be speaking at the PLI Open Source and Free Software 2014 event in San Francisco on Dec. 10th. Discussions regarding the TCK issues have been rebooted. No issues requiring board attention or action at this time.
A relatively typical month with no issues or actions required by the board. No progress on the TCK issue.
A relatively typical month with no issues or actions required by the board. One item of note was discussed during the last 4 weeks. It was the recurring thread regarding modifying the CLAs for cases where there is no copyright (the typical example is code from/by US Federal Government employees). It was explained that (1) this has already been addressed, both by the ASF and several government agencies that such modification is not required and (2) regardless of whether copyright exists within the US or not, it doesn't affect its existence outside of the US, and the CLAs are designed to be valid in the larger, world-wide arena. This should likely become a FAQ (if it isn't already).
A relatively typical month with no issues or actions required by the board. Two issues of note have popped up during the last few weeks, and the intent is to reach consensus and closure in short order. The 1st has to do with the exclusivity requirement of the Apple App Store, and how it affects official distribution of Apache software via that vehicle. The second is a relatively recent thread regarding an individual taking ASF code and simply relicensing it, and whether that is legal or not. It has been explained that as long as the conditions of the ALv2 are followed, relicensing is allowed.
Nothing of note to report.
Most of the activity the last month has been in discussions related to the legal and ASF-wide policy aspects related to our release process. One interesting "topic" of the discussion is who "owns" the release policy; for the time being, this is still being considered a Legal Affairs discussion, at least. Due to the relatively low-turnout, quorum-wise, of last month's members meeting, there has also been discussion around the reason for a required quorum, how it is (or should be) counted, and the sections of the bylaws which could (or should) be altered to reflect any changes. At present, there are no recommendations to be provided to the board. Overall, there are no issues requiring board attention or concern.
Nothing of note to report this month. Work on TCK clarification and iCLA "compatibility" with "public domain" software and the US government are ongoing.
Due to a new pluggable transparent mechanism allowing users to store certain columns in RDBMS in an encrypted form, Apache Cayenne was required to classify themselves in order to compliant with US export regulations. Unfortunately, the ASF crypto page has been "outdated" for awhile concerning the new process; I advised them to continue with the old process but I will work on updating the page to reflect the current required (and hopefully more streamlined) process. There was a long, but useful thread regarding the iCLA and its applicability with non-copyrighted material (usually since the creator is a US government employee). The end-result is the general consensus that this is a non- issue. JIRA questions are being handled in a timely fashion. No open issues requiring board attention.
Somewhat slow but steady stream of posts with the one regarding "why is LGPL on the Not Allowed List" receiving the honor of most posts. There is nothing that requires board attention at this time
Relatively slow but steady month. No progress yet on Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) issue. Geir has offered to help regarding conversations with Oracle related to TCK access (renewals as well as new ones). We are operating under the understanding that we still can test against expired TCKs in the meantime.
The discussion regarding the suitability of Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 as a Category A license is still on hold as we await the availability of the CC General Counsel. FWIW, this issue can be seen as a continuation of, or offshoot of, https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-167. Mark Thomas proposed a directed question regarding the ability for ASF PMCs to continue to use, and validate against, expired TCKs. Upon reading the TCK agreement, Section 10.3 appears to explicitly allow for such continued use assuming we abide by all other conditions of the agreement, which does not appear to be an issue. I have asked for our pro-bono legal counsel to verify and comment. So far, we have not rec'd a response, so we are continuing to act based on our understanding that such continued use is OK.
The transition from Sam as VP Legal to myself is progressing smoothly. Once again, Thanks to Sam for his work in the this role the many years. There was a spirited but enlightening discussion regarding the suitable of Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 as a Category A license (as related to usability with, and capability with, the ALv2). It was agreed that the discussion had reached the end of its usefullness without further feedback or guidance by Creative Commons, as to their intents behind the license and how it relates to commercial redistribution. We are reaching out to the CC General Counsel for further information; due to her unavailability while attending a conference/seminar, I don't anticipate an update until January. FWIW, this issue can be seen as a continuation of, or offshoot of, https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-167. Mark Thomas proposed a directed question regarding the ability for ASF PMCs to continue to use, and validate against, expired TCKs. Upon reading the TCK agreement, Section 10.3 appears to explicitly allow for such continued use assuming we abide by all other conditions of the agreement, which does not appear to be an issue. I have asked for our pro-bono legal counsel to verify and comment.
There was a request to classify CC-BY as a category A license, in support of a W3C HTML WG experiment. As no ASF projects are known to be affected by this experiment, this request was resolved as Not A Problem. In the process, the entire Third Party Licensing Policy was called into question. I thank everybody who helped resolve this. Notable other discussions: ODC-By was approved for use by VXQuery. Distribution by ASF PMCs of ASF Projects as iOS Applications is stalled by an Apple imposed requirement that precludes other distributions. After over five years as VP, Legal Affairs I have decided to step down and recommend Jim Jagielski as my replacement.
Sam submitted a brief verbal report. Committee is running routinely. One item Sam would appreciate board members (and others) weighing in on the distribution of iOS applications in the App Store: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-174
No report was submitted.
Relatively routine month, nothing requiring board attention. Thanks go out to Jim Jagielski for monitoring the lists while I was on vacation. Notable discussions: By an overwhelming vote, the Legal Affairs Committee declined to add a requirement for a copyright notice in source headers. In theory this should have unblocked the short form header discussion (LEGAL-172), but for the moment it seems to have derailed it instead. Hopefully this will restart soon. There is interest by Cordova and others to distribute code via Apple's App Store. At the moment this is waiting on somebody to do the work to find and take a first pass at analyzing what the terms and conditions would be. Clerezza wishes to allow users to use Virtuoso JDBC libraries. These libraries are made available under a GPL license with a special exception for JDBC usage. As it turns out Clerezza does not intend to distribute these libraries, so there is no concern. Apache Commons would like to distribute some sample CSV files from the US government -- files without an obvious copyright. As there is contact information provided on the website, the best approach would be to ask for clarification.
Busy month. Carry overs from last month: * Issue 144: (short version of license headers) Despite the previously approved license header not having a copyright statement, we have a single individual strongly opposed to approving any new versions unless a copyright header is included in every source file that contains a license header. A large number of people have expressed strong opposition to any requirement for copyright header to be added to every source file. Sadly, I don't see anybody changing their mind on this matter, so this will need to proceed to a vote (the first time I recall this happening since I took this position) * Issue 167 (CC-By license) Barring any additional discussion, this license will be moved from Category A to Category B. Notable new discussions: * Our previous agreements for access to various TCKs has expired, and Oracle has provided a new agreement. This new agreement is not consistent with the 2002 side-letter we received from Sun: http://jakarta.apache.org/site/sideletter.pdf This matter was referred to the SFLC, and they provided this feedback on our behalf to Oracle. Oracle has not yet responded. * I've forwarded on a review the current the ECCN process to the SFLC to see if there needs to be any updates. * The SFLC is collecting data for a response to the Teradata request made to the Hive PMC (see last month's Hive board report for details). * Whether or not it is permissible to distribute third party binaries which are made available under a license that permits distribution but has a field of use restriction, a requirement to pay attorney's fees, and a requirement to pass on restrictions. * Similar discussion over shipping in source form third party code that fixes a JavaDoc security problem, where the license limited how that source could be used. This request was withdrawn as other, better, alternatives were found. * As the Maven report indicates, the project is currently not complying with license header requirements as applied to their test data, but is working on building a plan to correct this over time. Kudos to the Maven PMC for both catching this and to committing to build a plan to bring Maven releases into compliance.
There are two topics of interest this month: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-167: During what was originally a routine evaluation of a new version of the CC-By license, some restrictions that previously went unnoticed in that license were identified. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-114: During discussion of a request to reduce the size of legal boilerplate accompanying files contained in distributions of Apache products, suggestions were made to add a copyright notice. My request is that discussions regarding the latter matter be referred to the Legal Affairs committee.
Relatively quiet month. Nothing requiring board attention. Longest thread involved determining what constitutes a source release. Impetus was a desire to include third party fonts in svn. Conclusion was that these particular fonts were made available under a Category B license so that they could be made available, but were not the "preferred form for making modifications" so could not be considered source. After determining a small number of issues that need to be worked before we consider signing a new TCK license with Oracle, I had Dan Kulp introduce Aaron Williamson of the SFLC to discuss these issues with Oracle on our behalf.
Activity is up this month. Nothing requiring board attention. Two highlights: * Some general and some specific discussion on takedown notices. No policy changes have been made to date. * Review of the TCK contract is proceeding slowly. We likely will be passing the comments received past the SFLC and back to Oracle this month.
No report was submitted. There is a new agreement for TCK access. Under review.
Extremely quiet month. Only discussion of note is once best summarized by Roy's statement: "Obey the license and follow the golden rule". Upcoming: I plan to spend some time looking into the JCP TCK issues.
List traffic is up, but remains constructive. Key topics include license headers, not allowing modification of our grant agreements, and avoiding adoption or use of Category X licenses in Apache code. Export requirements is not resolved; Santuario and Wookie accepted the recommendation to submit a notification, now Subversion has questions. I'll keep pinging the SFLC.
Nothing requiring board attention. Notable events this month: A PMC was notified of an alleged ADA violation - the PMC in question seems to be pursuing this appropriately. Wookie continues to wait for a potential change to the ASF policy regarding security notifications. This hasn't happened, and I don't recommend that they wait for something that may not happen. See comment on this month's Wookie report. Also: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-148 Trying to find a way forward with Mark Thomas and Daniel Kulp regarding TCKs. Nothing to report just yet.
A fairly quiet month -- both in terms of the number of threads and the length/"temperature" of each -- nothing to concern the board. Most topics concern license compatibility questions. Aaron Williamson of the SFLC indicated that he will try to get a preliminary answer to the crypto question by the end of the month. I've started to work again with Daniel Kulp and Mark Thomas regarding the TCK issue. One way or another we should try to wrap this up early next year.
No report was submitted.
No report was submitted. AI: Sam Ruby to pursue a report for Legal Affairs
No report was submitted. Busier than previous months. Nothing major to report. The biggest topic is how to allow GPL and LGPL components to be used by projects.
No report was submitted. Extremely quiet this month. Only item of interest is continuing discussion of TCKs.
A healthy amount of discussion, both in terms of volume and demeanor, occurred this month. Notable amongst the normal backdrop of discussions concerning licenses, notices, and trademarks: * We are asking the board to add Kevan Miller to the Legal Affairs Committee, a board resolution to this affect appears later in the agenda. * Amazon US expressed an interest in entering Apache OpenOffice into their store. The SFLC is reviewing the contract that Amazon provided. * Our agreement with Oracle for access to TCKs is expiring, and a legal review has been requested.
Exceptionally quiet month, only three JIRA showed any notable activity, and no discussions meriting board attention occurred.
Once again, we have had a more normal level of activity, with the majority of discussions being anchored by a handful (more precisely: six) JIRA tickets. One notable discussion: we confirmed that if PMCs determine that a codebase has a single author and there is an ICLA in place for that work that they can allow it to be committed.
DLA Piper LLP's engagement letter has been signed and filed. It looks like we are settling quickly to a split where DLA Piper handles Trademarks affairs, which means that I likely will treat the SFLC as primary for all other legal matters. Of course, this is just the 'default', individual circumstances can influence this on a case by case basis. Discussions that the board should be aware of: Adobe's RTMP specification license (LEGAL-120). Not clear yet whether it is something we need to worry about, whether or not it amounts to a Field of Use restriction. If the latter, it appears that our intended use is not one that would be permitted. Aggregation of GPL dictionaries with Apache Open Office was approved (LEGAL-117) The Army initially determined the Apache License, version 2.0 was incompatible with the Antideficiency Act. They later determined that this was not something they needed to worry about. Multiple separate conversations about contributions that were previously made available elsewhere. Two easy cases: smallish and self contained single author code bases need nothing more than an ICLA from that contributor; established projects with multiple contributors need either a Software Grant or documentation that identifies how the accepting [P]PMC came to the conclusion that all of the contributors have been identified and that they have given their approval. Additionally, larger code bases or code bases with multiple contributors will also have to be verified as free of unacceptable dependencies. Ultimately, this may lead to a major update to the so-called "Short Form" for Intellectual Property Clearance at the Incubator. All in all, this was an active month in that there were quite a number of other threads. Overall these were largely without controversy, and no board action is required at this time.
Active month on JIRA and the mailing lists. No issues for the board. An example of the longest thread: Are license headers really mandatory in every source file? We have received an offer from DLA Piper's to represent the ASF for intellectual property and international tax matters. Their engagement letter is under final review, and should be signed shortly.
Mailing list has returned back to quieter times, with the focus being on JIRA entries. One such JIRA issue merits calling out: Legal-177: Aggregation of GPL dictionaries with Apache Open Office is likely to be approved by the time of this board meeting.
Most of the productive work of the committee continues via JIRA. One item I would specifically call to attention involves the Apache OpenOffice project shipping GPL dictionaries: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-117 There was a significant abuse of the legal-internal mailing list. That has since quieted down. Repeated abuses will not be tolerated, and will result in the individual in question being unsubscribed. Such an action will not affect any read-only access that the individual may have via the web archives, nor even their ability to post - it simply will be the case that such posts will need to be individually moderated in.
Much of the activity this month was focused on JIRA: 6 issues created, 5 issues resolved/closed, and 5 others made progress. Most of the issues deal with policy questions with respect to license compatibility: i.e., questions of the form "is it OK for an ASF project to depend on code made available under license X?" Notable discussions: ooo wishes to continue to use, maintain, and distribute GPL'ed build scripts for the time being; I've asked to see a plan to migrate to something else. If there is a credible plan, I will likely approve a time limited transition during incubation. Discussion about a user withdrawing permission to include a patch, the response to this question was to try to accommodate that request if possible.
Typical month with nothing that requires board attention. Most of the discussion concerns either OO.o or trademarks (or both). Notable threads: there was a request to modify the CCLA for NSA, but ultimately the NSA decided they could sign the CCLA that we have. There was also a discussion about allowing corporations to opt in to have their CCLAs listed publicly. The latter discussion seems to have died down.
Back to being a more quiet month. Longest public threads deal with the ooo podling exploring under what conditions an ICLA is necessary, and I see no issues coming out of that thread.
Largely a quiet month, with most activity related to the recent Open Office.org donation. Nothing requiring board action. Noteworthy discussions: One concerned the need for IP clearance of code previously developed elsewhere under an Apache License. We reminded them of the terms stated in the ICLA and the traditional Apache position that all contributions are voluntary. In this case, the ball is in the Maven PMC's court to determine if they wish to proceed, and if so, whether they will seek a Software Grant or some sort of exception. Thanks go out to Roy for helping in this discussion. Another concerned the categorization of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. We have yet to find consensus on a categorization. I asked for specifics as to the module in question, and have yet to hear back. Finally, there was a discussion about the confusion between Copyright assignments as some non-ASF projects require and Copyright Licenses which the ASF requires. No action has yet been taken.
Production of documents for the Oracle subpoena is proceeding. Similar status exists for Google's informal request on the same case. As discussed, we are proceeding without requiring a formal subpoena. At the present time, Aaron is waiting on some some input from Geir. We have had one violation of confidentiality where an attorney's email was forwarded to legal-internal without prior permission. I've taken steps to ensure that this does not reoccur. How to deal with confidentiality is a common theme these days. Larry Rosen met privately via teleconfererence to discuss in non-specific terms how to deal with code that remediates patent infringement concerns. Larry is also investigating the current status of the W3C Patent Advisory Group policy. We have had a request from the defendants in a TQP Development LLC vs Capital Group Companies complaint. Larry Rosen and Mark Thomas are following up. Until we have a published policy on confidentiality that handles these kinds of discussions, these discussions are generally happening off-list. Larry continues to work the OpenOffice.org trademark assignment from Oracle, with input from others. Karen Sandler has left the SFLC. Aaron Williamson and Justin Colannino will continue to support the ASF.
Busy month; major items include responding to the Oracle subpoena and receiving a software grant from Oracle for OpenOffice.org. Larry is leading discussions concerning transferring the associated trademarks. Aaron is leading the response to the subpoena. He has produced an initial set of documents and is still evaluating more, including from board-private. Whom we choose to disclose this information to beyond what we are legally required to do is up to us, and the subject of a sometimes heated debate. There are clear signs of animosity between some of the participants on legal internal, and that is inhibiting the use of the mailing list for discussions. I am taking steps to correct this. Additionally, we have gotten a similar request for information from Google. Instead of pursuing a subpoena they have simply made a request. As we were not the ones that required Oracle to issue a subpoena, we can simply provide the requested information or require Google to provide a subpoena. My recommendation is that we simply provide the information. Sadly, Larry has reported that i4i prevailed over Microsoft and the standard of "clear and convincing" evidence remains the standard of proof required to invalidate a patent. Other discussions include Travel/Medical insurance for conference attendees and how PMCs are to deal with patent claims.
The big news is that we received a subpoena from Oracle to supply documents that may relate to their ongoing litigation with Google. The SFLC has been chosen to coordinate the response to this request. An extension request has been made and granted. Next to that, the longest thread on the legal-discuss mailing list involved a law student trying to get us to provide interpretations in response to licensing questions. I'm pleased to report that everybody at the ASF responded appropriately with suggestions ranging from "get a lawyer" to "go read a book". Other threads include historical data relating to various ongoing trademark issues.
More discussion than recent months; nothing requiring board attention. Most significant (both in terms of volume of discussion and in terms of relevance) is that the ASF legal web site was updated to clarify that ASF projects may have purely optional dependencies that are not enabled by default on codebases made available under licenses such as the LGPL.
Continues to be quiet with no board level issues. Resolved an issue which allows Derby to proceed with releasing an implementation of JDBC 4.1. Some progress has been made on coming to consensus on releasing a product with optional dependencies, but it is awaiting somebody to create a suitable patch. Reviewed Subversion's discussions with WANDisco over trademark compliance. In general, trademark discussions are trending down. We continue to get the occasional random request for legal advice for projects outside of the ASF. Generally these requests are from individuals. We continue to decline to provide such advice.
Another exceedingly quiet month. No issues for the board. Primary activities: * Larry continues to shepherd the Amicus Brief in Microsoft vs i4i. Karen Sandler also participated. * Legal review and approval of the efforts to resolve the Subversion/WANdisco trademark issues. * We decided to invite Jennifer O'Neill to participate in the Legal Affairs committee. See resolution 7A in the agenda. * General support in response to requests from the VP, Brand Management. * Exploration of Jenkins coming to the ASF. Feedback was universally positive. It will be up to the developers of Jenkins to decide whether or not they wish to pursue this. * Fielded miscellaneous questions, such as BSD license usage by podlings and the conditions under which a project may move externally.
Discussions even quieter than last month, mostly in support of Trademark discussions. Nothing requiring board attention. A minor revision of the Amicus Brief in support of Microsoft v. i4i re: burden of proof in invaliding trademarks is in process. Larry Rosen continues to lead this effort.
Extremely quiet month. No board level issues. Most of the effort this month went into support for the Branding and JCP VP's. We have three unrelated efforts where the owners of projects have expressed an interest in allowing projects here at the ASF based on their work, but aren't quite in a position where they can sign a CCLA. We need to work through the details. One routine Crypto Notice question was fielded by Larry. Karen supported Jim with the preparation of the EA contract. As expected, we haven't spent any of the legal budget so far this year; my position remains that it makes sense to carry this line item forward as an authorization to spend without requiring board review.
Three JIRAs created, zero closed. Mostly this has been a steady state (similar number being opened and closed), will watch to see if this is an anomaly or if we will start to accumulate a backlog. Larry and Karen fielded some trademark questions. I'm not seeing any signs that the split between Branding and Legal Affairs is causing any confusion (it had in the past). Miscellaneous discussions include JXTA/JXSE (which uses and older version of the Apache License) and Fair-use data in SVN. Much discussion regarding Harmony and the state of the JCP, one concrete outcome of that was a blog posting entitled "Read Beyond the Headers". I've not proceeded as promised on expanding the Legal Affairs committee or documenting processes, mostly due to travel and lack of time. I still intend to follow through on this. Legal Affairs approved of the signing of the agreement with Google regarding Apache Extras.
We signed onto the amicus brief to Microsoft's petition to the US Supreme Court in the Microsoft v. I4I case which was prepared by the EFF. Special thanks to Larry for bringing this to our attention and driving this issue. Based on everything I have seen, our participation has been well received. As the board has decided not to pursue establishing a General Counsel at this time, I plan to start the process of documenting the various roles and responsibilities. During this process, I will be looking to expand participation in the Legal Affairs Committee. Three JIRA issues opened, and three closed this month. Most significant, JIRA issue 80 (NTLM Inclusion) was approved. This previously had been a board action item. We've received a request from the TAC to write/review a waiver of medical liability. Larry and Sam have been participating in discussions relating to the JCP contract dispute. Nothing specific to report at this time. The Legal Affairs Committee also continues to support the work of the VP of Brand Management.
Progress is being made on addressing the two board level action items: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-80 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XALANJ-2438 Microsoft recently filed a petition for certiorari in the US Supreme Court in the Microsoft v. I4I case. Larry is pursuing additional information. The likely outcome is that we should express our support for Microsoft's petition. Mozilla has release a draft alpha of MPL 2, which is intended to be Apache License, Version 2.0 compatible. Pursuant to our discussion in the F2F board meeting, Larry has put out a call for additional attorney volunteers. None of the people identified so far have participated in legal-discuss to date, which is a bit of a concern, but nobody has been ruled out. Absent a General Counsel, we still have the potential problem of "lawyer shopping". I'm looking to identity concrete cases of problems when it occurs. None have been identified since the F2F :-) Meanwhile, we should be able to mitigate this somewhat by limiting access to multiple lawyers to the Officers that routinely would have need to access such resources. I believe that would be President; VP, Brand Management; and VP, Legal Affairs.
Exceptionally quiet month, with the exception of one resolution on today's agenda. Routine matters dealing with license headers, trademark due diligence, incorporating public domain code, and verifying that a specific patent is covered by our license/Jira/ICLA/CCLA processes. We reaffirmed that we will not accept custom CCLAs from corporations that are inclined to treat our agreement as a template. We have begun to discuss the subject of appointing a General Council. On the subject of Henri's resignation, he will be sorely missed. It is no secret that he was a large part of what effectively is a very small community.
A quiet couple of months. 3 JIRA's opened, 3 closed (one new, two old). Routine questions just as JSON license, IP clearance, and trademark issues were discussed. Nothing meriting board attention. Larry has suggested that the ASF name a General Counsel, and volunteered for the task. I support both suggestions. Should we adopt the suggestion, a separate Legal Affairs VP may no longer be needed - we can either retire the position or simply name the same individual that to that role. I suggest that we take that up when we name other Executive officers.
More active than previous months, but still mostly quiet activity. Two new JIRA issues, 5 JIRA issues closed, one other JIRA issue worked. No issues for the board. Significant activity supporting Brand Management as it relates to Trademark Law. Division of labor between the two efforts seems clear and no conflicts to report. Some discussion on what patents would be licensed to the ASF as a result of contributions covered by ICLAs and CCLAs. No clarifications resulted from this discussion.
Light month. Two issues closed, two others discussed, and no issues opened. Larry Rosen signed on behalf of the ASF a petition to the American Law Institute to release their "Principles of Law of Software Contracts" for free for review of the constituencies that care about it. Discussion about documenting a more fine grained organization of the Legal Affairs committee started and looks likely to peter out. Initial planning work has begun to increase trademark coordination between the ASF and Eclipse, impetus being the fact that there are unrelated projects named Apache Scout and Eclipse Scout. Everything appears cordial. Initial work has begun at the Mozilla foundation on a revision of the MPL. One goal of the revision is to make it more obviously one-way compatible (i.e., allowing Apache Licensed artifacts can be included in MPL licensed code bases). The ASF supports this goal. Yahoo! donated its Trademark registration for the Traffic Server to the ASF.
In contrast to last month's blitz, this month saw 3 new JIRAs created and 5 others actively worked on. We had a lengthy discussion on the advisability of reading patents. I need to work on getting the XAP incubator site clearly marked as shut down. I am recommending that the same budget that was present in the FY2009-2010 for legal expenses be present in the FY2010-2011. The amount in $2,500. Trademark discussions continue to bleed over into legal mailing lists, but this is not a problem, in fact I will suggest that it is less of a problem now that Trademarks is separately called out from PRC, and Trademarks clearly have a legal aspect. In other words, the owner is clear, and Legal plays a supporting role.
JIRA: 6 closed, 13 worked on, 0 opened; mostly during a blitz by Henri on 19 December (Thanks Henri!). Discussions of note: * Moving Copyright notices (a.k.a. dealing with an uncooperative donor) * Public Domain (primarily example code)
All activity this month fairly routine: one new JIRA opened, one closed, and progress on 5 others. Assisted the new VP, Brand Management; am monitoring one potential IP Clearance / Pedigree issue in a Incubator podling. On the latter, I'm satisfied that the PPMC is taking the appropriate steps.
Things are running smoothly, a few items that the board may wish to be aware of and/or directly participate in: 1) Working with Sonatype to determine how best enable their company to succeed while preserving the ASF's right to enforce a Trademark on the term Maven. 2) Debate on the suitability of the OWFa specification license within the ASF. At the moment, this discussion is hypothetical, as the ASF has no codebases intending to implement specifications under such licenses. This may become relevant as this license is being proposed for consideration by the W3C. 3) Early discussions on how to deal with individuals that continue to misuse our trademarks even after repeated requests. One result of this discussion can be found as resolution 7A on today's meeting agenda. 4) ASF Corporation status was renewed by Jim. 5) Richard Hall is coordinating access to the OSGi CT.
Very uneventful month. One issue created, two discussed. Mostly dealing with topics like Artistic and CC-SA licensed materials for tutorials and test data (e.g., metal Olympics table). Additionally, the Legal PMC participated in trademark license discussions (in support of the PRC), and reviewed responses to the EU (in support of the VP, JCP). The Legal Affairs Committee is OK with WSRP4J releasing and graduating. I'd like to thank Niclas Hedhman for his positive contributions during his membership in the Legal Affairs Committee. He will be missed.
Active month (on the order of 4 dozen unique threads), but relatively free of controversy; certainly nothing requiring board attention. Most of the actionable items are occurring on JIRA, with four items created, three closed, one reopened, and forward progress on four others. Notable discussions: Licensing of the feather logo under ALv2 (on request from the PRC), the recommendation is to (continue?) to license such under the ALv2. LGPL behind an isolation layer (current position: we will allow the dependency, but not the ASF distribution of the software) Received a trademark infringement concern on one of our incubating projects, I am pursuing it with the podling in question. Progress is slow but has resumed on resolving the WebCollage and WSRP4J licensing issue.
The only issue that merits board attention is the licensing of trademarks. My understanding remains that beyond ensuring that the way we license our trademarks is legal, all policy decisions in this area are the purview of the PRC. I've tried to reinforce this a number of times, mostly unsuccessfully. Very active month, most of it centered around JIRA issues. By my count, 8 issues were opened and 7 closed; forward progress was made on 18 others. As a general rule, this is progressing without controversy; the only issues that merit highlighting as a potential for a broader review is issue 26 (LICENSE and NOTICE in SVN) and issue 34 (release voting procedures). The Legal Affairs Committee provided significant input to Geir's impending responses to various DOJ and EC requests, and intends to support Geir in every way. See the JCP report for more details. It is hard to characterize the remainder of discussions, they ranged from the relative merits of the Apache License vs [L]GPL, how to deal with non-ASF licensed code in JIRA, combining the Apache License with other licenses ranging from public domain to MPL, and IP clearance.
At the present time, I don't see any issues needing board attention. Exceedingly quiet month. There was a question about the autoconf license which was addressed by pointing to the resolved list. There was a discussion about the license of research papers posted on web sites, which didn't reach a conclusion. There were discussions about the Pope's position on Patents, and on the use of Apache 2.0 by University with patents (the latter was taken off-list). Jansi (non-ASF tool) is licensed under Apache License with optional dependency on LGPL, and this kicked off the predictable discussions. I continue to believe that such discussions will continue with people taking extreme positions until and unless such questions are grounded in a tangible request by a PMC (or podling), at which point I am confident that pragmatism will win. There were two legal internal discussions that did not result in any concrete actions being taken. I'd like to thank Bill Rowe for his positive contributions during his membership in the Legal Affairs Committee. He will be missed.
Summary: * In general, things appear to be progressing smoothly, though I think I see the first signs of things that might end up falling through the cracks. Will continue to monitor. See items marked with a (*) * While I am quite comfortable with the split between the PRC and Legal(and Incubator, for that matter) on trademarks, the topic of trademark selection and enforcement continues to pop up. As long as nobody raises any concerns about the discussions and no decisions are reached exclusively on legal mailing lists, I'm OK with it. Details: Larry extended the time (for 6 months) in which the ASF must respond to the PTO before the SpamAssassin Trademark becomes effective. He can not proceed until the website is corrected. PHP license approved as category A. GPLv3 license identified as category X. Statements by the FSF indicating that the ASF license is "compatible" with GPLv3 was, as predicted, a cause of confusion. Pivot decided to continue with their plans to host their Flex BlazeDB demo outside of the ASF infrastructure given that that code has a dependency on GPLv3 licensed code. Henri noted some "dodgy" code in Checkstyle (specifically some Sun specific Swing code). The code is available under BSD with 'no nuclear facility' clause. (*) General discussion (without providing any legal advice) occurred in response to a question about establishing another open source non-profit. We discussed using JIRA for tracking ICLAs. It wasn't clear what benefit that provided. A general question on "reciprocity" with respect to section 5 of our license was answered. No change to the license is planned. The author of the dictionary in question agreed to provide a copy under the Apache License. Extensive discussion about improving the release process documentation. Patches expected to be forthcoming. (*) CUP Parser Generator license a.k.a. "Standard ML of New Jersey" was reviewed and thought to be Category A. (*) General discussion on what 'required notices' meant. Unsurprisingly, the answer was 'notices that are required' :-) A question about using Apache CXF in a GPL licensed codebase was answered by pointing the ASF and FSF faqs. General discussion on trademarks (IMHO, bordering on PRC's responsibility, but as no decisions were made, no harm) Lengthy discussion (without concrete results) on tagging release candidates and Java. A question about ECCN exports was answered by pointing to the web page describing our export licenses. A question about binary PDF documents in a release for Apache Stonehenge was answered. It involved README vs NOTICE and Copyright vs Trademark considerations. Developing more general education and posting it on our website would be helpful in this area. General question on the trademark-ability of greek letters. Delta airlines seem to have done so. A question on how we view the Day spec license was asked, without attracting an answer (*). It doesn't directly affect Jackrabbit, as Day has a CCLA on file. Question (motivated by VCL, but applies to a number of ASF projects) on whether or not we intend to trademark names that were in use prior to donation to the ASF. A few com.sun.* APIs seem to have found their way into effectively becoming part of standards. Notes were shared on how to deal with this. Microsoft Limited Public License was categorized as "X" as it has a field of use clause. A TM was added to the Tomcat logo. Another case that properly is something the PRC should be concerned with. When this discussion moved onto the ASF feather logo, Larry did request that this be continued at the PRC. PDFBox wishes to include some CJK fonts which are licensed in a way that does not permit modification. As it doesn't affect the ability for us to release our code under our license, this license is thought to be category B. Active discussion (incomplete) on copyright and trademark of hosting of research papers on our site. Larry dealt with a DMCA notice that was misdirected towards the ASF.
Another quiet month. Nothing requiring board attention. Summary of mailing
list discussions:
ASF Business (topic on first line, summary of resolution on next line):
Is it OK for Maven to have an optional dependency on svnkit (GPL)?
- withdrawn
How does one bring a JSON plugin into the ASF?
- referred to http://incubator.apache.org/ip-clearance/index.html
What's the policy on copyright headers (for Pivot)
- referred to http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html
Shindig is considering a logo contest question, any advice?
- a pointer to a related effort (Solr) was provided
Is it OK to copy Sun JDK source code (GPLv2) into an ASF project?
- no
Do donation include trademarks (for VCL)?
- ask the contributor (NCSU) to make this more explicit
Is a grant required for a large contribution?
- No, a ICLA/CCLA is sufficient, but if the contribution is truly large,
Incubator IP clearance is required.
Continuing discussion of OASIS OpenCSD XSDs...
- Tuscany project is proceeding treating these artifacts as read only.
External questions:
Do forks of ASF projects need to publish source?
- no
Follow on: what does prominent notice mean?
- ask a lawyer
Know any good IP lawyers? (Not a follow-on)
- we don't provide such recommendations.
Active month, nothing requiring board attention beyond a passing mention of
staffing. Summary:
internal:
LGPL optional library for testing CouchDB (OK)
DOM4J (BSD style license, accepted)
JSR 173 license (replaced with an ALv2 equiv)
Protocol Buffer License (verified as BSD)
Unicode data license (ICU: OK)
MSV license (category X: due to FOU)
License Headers question (dealing with BSD)
Question as to when CCLAs are required (QPid)
OASIS license of XSDs (not separately licensed?)
OLIO fragment cache license (MIT)
ICLA required for student under contract? (wouldn't hurt)
Use of Prolog (the language) (OK)
Abstract question on documentation (need specifics)
outside:
Permission to reuse our CLA form itself (granted!)
Question as to whether the ECCN "conveys" to commercial users (answer:
exemption may not apply - consult a lawyer)
General question as to whether ASF code can be sublicensed commercially
(can and does)
Hypothetical Discussion between Bruce Perens and Larry Rosen (over my head)
Referred elsewhere:
Two separate potential violation of an ASF Trademark (to PRC)
Advice for book authors (to PRC)
IP-clearance question (to incubator)
While traffic has picked up from last month, absolutely none of it should be of any concern to the board. Brief summary: * General questions on public domain and fair use * A question about a previously approved license (zlib/libpng) * Two questions on IP clearance, one quick and one more involved, both forwarded to the incubator * A JSR spec contained obsolete licensing terms (Geir quickly dove in) * An inquiry on trademark considerations, including the project logo and the ASF feather from committers on an ASF project working on a book. * An internal discussion on open letters. The list also attracts questions from users. While it is not something that we are set up to do (or, in fact, a service we intend to provide), it has not proven to be a problem in practice. Discussions of this nature from the past month: * Request for advice on a project desiring to use the Apache License and depend on code licensed under the GPL. * A webapp developer asked a question about the MySQL license * A developer of an application on sourceforge asked about how to structure his LICENSE file given that his project is based on an ASF project * A general question about defensive publication as a way to protect against patent trolls. * A general question on internal use of Apache projects
Very quiet month, nothing requiring board attention. Highlights: Naming discussion on JSecurity. Probably would not have given approval to that name in the first place, but given that the name has been in use for four years without an issue being raised, there isn't consensus on requiring a change. That being said the naming discussion was an inevitable bikeshed. Discussion of whether a given W3C license was category 'B' or 'X'. Given that the code in question was dual licensed with BSD, the question was moot. A discussion about a different W3C license and the policy of not allowing non-OSS code in SVN wandered off into nowhere as hypothetical discussions are want to do. There was a similar discussion about PDF CJK fonts, and it appears that the direction there will be to dynamically download the data vs polluting SVN. A question about dealing with the US Government was handled by Larry off-list.
Most significant thread has the unfortunate subject line of
"use of proprietary binaries". I say unfortunate, as it is unduly
prejudicial. The essence of the pragmatism behind "category B" is to
identify artifacts whose licenses, while different than our own, don't
affect the ability of us developing our code under our license. As long
as the dependency is clearly marked and we are not distributing these
artifacts, we should be good. Related questions such as whether such
artifacts can be checked into SVN, etc. should be examined in terms of
infrastructure burden and potential to increase confusion, and not excluded
as a blanket matter of policy.
The context for the above is optional external APIs and compliance test
suites. While we would all love for these to be open, that's not a
requirement. The line in the sand is whether or not usage of such affects
our ability to develop our code under our license.
By contrast, redistribution of PDF CJK fonts, for which the license clearly
states that the "contents of this file are not altered" was greeted warmly,
albeit with a separate discussion about patents.
Other threads:
Does working on Sun RI automatically "contaminate" developer, and preclude
them from working on ASF project? Answer: not in general, though specific
PMCs may have specific rules in place depending on the nature of the project.
Lenya website redesign - ensuring that the contributions are under the
appropriate license.
Obtaining licenses for testing purposes - original question dealt with
WebSphere, but wondered off to TCKs.
Branding question ("AskApache") referred to PRC.
Continued discussion about Google Analytics. No consensus that there is
a clear issue yet.
A naming question for JSecurity lead to the inevitable bikeshedding...
It would be helpful to obtain a Notice of Allowance from Robyn in order to pursue registering the SpamAssassin Trademark. Sebastian Bazley updated the mailbox drop information on CCLAs to reflect our Wells Fargo lockbox. Discussed documenting privacy policies w.r.t. Google analytics and interpreting "internal use" as our project mailing lists. Parallel discussion occurred on site-dev. Advised Facelets to preserve NOTICEs and not to modify copyright claims in files that they copy. Jira item created for documenting the process for choosing names for ASF projects. Looks promising. Once again, a discussion of making section 5 of the Apache License, Version 2.0 more explicit via mailing list messages surfaced. Thankfully, it died quickly. My feeling is that what we have works for us for now, and shouldn't be changed unless there is a specific issue. A company offered Lucene access to archived blog data. There was a discussion concerning us hosting a copy of this, but this made some people uncomfortable w.r.t. potential copyright violations. Discussed w3c's copyright-documents-19990405.html. Overall doesn't look open source friendly, but we may be open to further discussion of checkin of unmodified sources with appropriate documentation. Reviewed Oracle's proposed revised JSR301 draft license
4 JIRA requests opened, 3 closed; all related to how to deal with "one off" licenses. Continuing discussions on Google Analytics and legal options related to the JCK impasse. Otherwise, a pretty quiet month.
Things continue to run smoothly. I'm pleased with the number of active participants. An abstract question was asked about an ability to commit to a project given exposure to prior ideas from a previous employer. In general, such a situation causes us no major concerns, though the situation may vary based on the specific projects and specific employers in question. PDFBox was originally BSD licensed and obtained software grants from all of the primary authors. A question was asked regarding small contributions from people who they are no longer able contact. Given the size of the contributions in question, the original license, and the fact that reasonable efforts were made to locate such people, it was determined that this was not a concern. A FAQ was added that older versions of Apache software licensed under Apache Software License 1.0 are still licensed as such. Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution version 3.0 license has been approved, provided the materials in question are unmodified. Previously, only the 2.5 version had been approved. A JIRA was opened on documenting release voting procedures. No owner. Larry helped resolve an issue where a company wished to rewrite our CCLA. Our policy is that we don't accept modified ICLAs or CCLAs. SyntaxHighlighter (LGPL) was approved for use on people.apache.org pages. Nobody seems to know the licensing status of BEA's StAX implementation, so most projects are simply routing around it. Larry has volunteered to register SpamAssassin trademarks. Given that the PRC and the SA PMCs are OK with this, if the board approves the expenditure, I'll tell him to proceed. David Crossley has produced a first draft of a project naming document. He's been on the list for over a year, and starting in July of this year has picked up his participation. Routine copyright/notice questions from Felix, CouchDB, JAMES and the Incubator. RSA's implementation of MD4/MD5 says one thing in their licensing headers and a quite different thing on their IETF IPR statement. I think we are covered, but we still need to settle how to document this properly. Bluesky inquired about moving away from some (unspecified) C++ Standard library implementation to STLPORT, presumably for licensing reasons. Everything I have heard to date indicates that we would be comfortable with either implementation. Google Analytics continues to be explored. Justin expressed an opinion that, while a bit stronger than I recall the board expressing, is one that I'm quite pleased and comfortable with: namely that we start from a presumption of data of this type being open to all, and work backwards from there -- making closed only what we must. A discussion has just started on the legal implications of contests involving prizes. If the prizes themselves are donated, and are substantial, we may have to consider such as targeted donations.
While comments were made on a half-dozen or so JIRA issues, none were either created or closed this month. I believe that this process is working smoothly, and does not warrant board attention. Notable discussions that occurred during this month: As reported elsewhere, Microsoft clarified their position on their Open Specification Promise. As near as I can tell, everybody feels that this completely resolves the issues surrounding the upcoming OOXML support by POI. The division of labor between the PRC, the incubator, and the Legal Affairs Committee continues to confuse people. My understanding is that the PRC is responsible for enforcing our claim to names, the incubator is responsible for IP clearance (including names), and the Legal Affairs Committee helps respond to claims made against the ASF. A GPL license question surfaced -- this started out with Xapian which is licensed under GPL v2 and confusion over what the FSF claims of "compatibility" with the Apache License means. Eventually this discussion wandered off into the territory of hypotheticals. GPL v2 remains on the ASF's restricted list (a.k.a. Category "X"). By contrast, syntax highlighter (licensed under the LGPL) was approved for the limited purposes of non-essential enhancement of online documentation. There was a brief discussion on "blanket" grants and "commit by proxy". This was resolved by citing the relevant sections of the ICLA which has explicit provisions for the enablement of submitting code on behalf of a third party. There was a brief discussion as to whether an ICLA sufficient when a person may have been exposed to ideas and alternate implementations from a previous employer. Our position is yes. Individual PMCs are welcome to set a higher bar for themselves. A permathread re-erupted: when are Apache License Headers needed? The general guidance is that they should be added whenever practical, but only where practical. There is an ongoing discussion about notice requirements when code is reused from other projects.
Resolved issues: * Documentation about the Legal Affairs Committee has been added to the web site (primary source: board resolutions) * Cobertura reports can be included in Apache distributions * Yahoo! DomainKeys Patent License Agreement v1.2 does not raise any concerns. Significant Discussions: * Permathread about policy issue about shipping LGPL jars reoccurred. again this month. * We are Revisiting whether or not there should be a JIRA checkbox concerning whether or not there should be a "Grant license to the ASF" checkbox and what the default should be. Other: * Received another inquiry from the owners of the Abator trademark.
Another month with little controversy. At this point /legal/resolved.html contains the bulk of the content from the draft 3party text upon which there is wide consensus. This includes the discussion of category 'A', 'B', and 'X' licenses. Henri has a real talent for proposing text upon which people can find common ground. The wiki that was previously set up at my request is not seeing much use. Relevant documents that were previously there (as well as on people.apache.org home directories) have been migrated to the website proper. A JIRA area has been established for tracking legal issues, and this has resulted in a lot of activity and issues moving to closure. Two major areas of future focus: Nearer term is a sincere desire in a number of areas to be more proactive about obtaining suitable licenses for potential patents. This has caused problems as patent licensing issues are not as clear cut as copyright or trademark issues. I'm comfortable having the Legal Affairs Committee making the call that, for example, WSRP4J and POI pose acceptable risks for the foundation, and downstream help PMCs mitigate those risks should these assessments prove to be unfounded. Longer term, clarifying and documenting the various notice requirements (NOTICE, LICENSE, README) needs attention.
A fairly quiet month. The iBATOR trademark infringement issue seems to have been resolved satisfactorily. Glassfish has now corrected the license issue with prior versions of their product (as of the last board report, they had only addressed the latest version). Andy Oliver is continuing to work quietly with myself and ASF council to see if we can identify and resolve his concerns with the Microsoft funding of Sourcesense to implement OOXML. WSRP4J appears to be in a roughly analogous place. There are no known actively enforced patents by either IBM or WebCollege that apply to this code, but a desire to preemptively and proactively get a license agreement. As indicated in the incubator report, nobody on the Legal Affairs Committee has expressed any concern with the changes proposed by Roy for the procedures for IP Clearance. Questions on compatibility with various licenses continue to pop up from time to time. No questions on third party licensing issues arose during the past month.
Sun has restored Apache License headers to the Jasper code with Glassfish V3. Craig Russell was instrumental in making this happen. I feel this issue is now closed. In related news, the Legal Affairs Commitee voted to add Craig to the committee, and it appears as resolution 7A on today's agenda. From time to time, I see a number of smaller items that come up on the legal mailing lists go unaddressed. I intend to continue to pursue expanding the Legal Affairs Committee membership. We received more information on the trademark concern, and this has resulted in Apache iBATIS beginning the process of renaming Apache iBATIS Abator to Apache iBATIS iBATOR. The Legal Affairs committee participated in a number of JCP and Harmony related discussions. This is already adequately covered by the report from the VP of JCP. The third party licensing policy continues to remain a draft and despite not being made into a policy, is still useful as a set of guidelines and hasn't prevented us from making meaningful progress on actual requests from podlings and PMCs, such as the request as to how Buildr is to treat dependencies covered under the Ruby license. There has been discussion regarding WSRP with respect to patents. While it isn't clear that there is a patent that reads on WSRP, but a member of the portals PMC sent a request inquiring as to how certain patents would be licensed by IBM and Web Collage. Upon review, the consensus seems to be that the agreement presented to us by Web Collage is not sufficient for our needs. POI has a situation where a committer has stated his intent to revert commits which were made several months ago based on a feeling that there may be patents which read on the code in question. Portions of the legal site are in flux, and meta discussion as to when and who can update the site occur from time to time. This is normal and healthy.
The third party draft has been a significant distraction. This document serves a quite useful purpose -- as a guide. Shortly after this month's board meeting, I plan to publish a short document describing how it is useful as a guide and identifying a few places where hard distinctions it attempts to make are overreaching and will not (yet) be enforced. Meanwhile, focus will return to concrete, tangible, and near-term decisions. The first two of which which will be resolved this week deal with code licensed for use "in the creation of products supporting the Unicode Standard" and an optional LGPL "deployer" distributed in source form. Other activities: * WSRP4J is looking into potential patent claims * Ongoing crypto notice work * Discussion on maintenance of the year on copyright notices * Question as to whether we would allow projects to dual license (answer: no) * Discussion of various open specification pledges, particularly Microsoft's * OSGI bundle requirements will require ServiceMix to create, maintain, and distribute a small amount of CDDL licensed descriptions. * Continuing confusion over the split between the NOTICE and LICENSE files, this needs to be dealt with by the Legal Affairs Committee * Fielded a question from a non-profit that wanted to base their license off of ours. * A growing list of open legal questions, mostly related to third party licensing. * Glassfish still hasn't restored the Apache License headers to Jasper files, despite some encouraging words that they were going to. Yet another letter was sent to Simon Phipps and the legal contact at Sun he provided me with.
Last month, I mentioned a potential trademark infringment issue that was brought to our attention. I contacted the individual requesting more information, and have not heard back. Until I hear more, I have no plans of pursing this further. Sun continues to ignore our request that the licence headers be restored on the portions of Glassfish. I have sent a third request (the first was in September) that Sun follow the FSF's recommendations on this matter. If Sun continues to drag their feed on this matter, it is time to explore other options to get Sun to comply. While this work has been ongoing for some time, this month there has been a marked uptick in the export classification activities and general awareness of these ECCN related issues. Most of the efforts of this month were on trying to refine the ASF's Third Party Licensing policy, primarily by attempting to create an informal poll. I seeded this with three hypothetical positions, and mostly people were divided into two camps. One camp didn't see much of a dividing line between the first two positions, but clearly saw position three as distinct and reacted negatively towards it. The other saw little difference between positions two and three, but reacted equally negatively to position 1 as the first camp did to position 3. A bare minimum that I believe that we can achieve ready consensus on is a policy that all sofware developed at the ASF from here on is to be licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0, and that we will take no actions that limit our ability to distribute our software under this license. Roy has indicated that this may not have been the policy in the distant past, but as near as I can tell, it has been the way that we have been operating for quite some time now, hence the conclusion that this should be able to readily gain consensus. One world view is that that bare minimum is not enough. One can argue that it makes little sense if our software is licensed under a pragmatic license if that sofware is entangled with dependencies that effectively eliminate all the pragmatic aspects of our license. The other world view is that our software is, well, soft; i.e., maleable. Our licensees are welcome to modify, combine, and optionally contribute back to our code bases. Furthermore, no matter how hard we try, our licensees are operate under a variety of different constraints or have a differing interpretations of license compatibility. Choosing between these two world views is difficult; but given that the former can only be executed if there are ample exceptions for "system" or "soft" dependencies -- concepts that are both undefinable and all too open to gaming -- clearly the latter is easiest to understand and administer. Or there is a belief that a "spec" from an industry consortia and with no independent implementations somehow makes copyright and patent issues less relevant. In any case, add to all this the evident divide, and the first world view becomes not only harder to understand and administer, it becomes absolutely unworkable. Simply put, an excemption for "system" dependencies that is based on a "I'll know it when I see it" policy doesn't work if a substantial portion of the people who may be drawn upon to express an opinion on the subject simply don't believe that any such distinction is either necessary or even makes sense as a policy. Therefore it appears that the only workable policy is one where we continue to require PMCs to compile a comprehensive set of LICENSEs to accompany each of our releases so that our licensees can make an informed decision. That, and perhaps to we can increase our efforts to educate PMCs as to the effects such dependencies have on community size. While this approach is workable, it is one that may be difficult to reverse. Hence, a slow and cautious approach is warranted. Should there be any as of yet unexpressed feedback, now would be a good time to provide it. I have reviewed the minutes for the meetings of 2005/06/22 and 2007/03/28 establishing the VP of Legal Affairs and the Legal Affairs Committee respectively, and believe that no board resolution and/or explicit approval is required for the Legal Affairs Committee to proceed on this matter.
The requested FAQ additions have been completed and posted. These
additions did attract quite a few comments of support, and everybody had
more than ample time to comment. I've seen no negative fallout as of yet
of these additions. I mention this because these additions were initially
controversial, but my impression is that over time some of the participants
simply got less vocal rather than converted.
Jason Schultz has left his staff attorney position at the EFF. Fred von
Lohmann of the EFF has agreed to support us in his place.
We have been informed of a potential tradmark infringment issue. I shoud
have more details by the next meeting.
There is a backlog of items that need to be addressed, preferably in
parallel rather than serially. Rather than waste report time on what
I perceive to be the biggest item, namely competing the Third Party
Licensing policy, time permitting, I've added a discussion item in the
hopes that we can come to a quick consensus on the approach. If quick
consensus isn't achievable here, then the hope is that this will serve
as a heads up so that the interested parties can participate in the
discussion on legal-discuss.
Other items in the backlog:
Third Party Licensing:
Minor update to to add OSOA as category A
Additional updates to cover notices of optional dependencies (log4cxx, apr)
Need a policy on whether depencencies on Ruby Gems are permissable (Buildr)
WSRP4J licensing issues (Portals)
Fork FAQ
No written report submitted. Brief discussion on the possibility of doing a BOF at ApacheCon.
After an extended quiet period, I thought I would collect up a few updates to the website, but that re-awoke the discussion. What's cool is that this time around, there actually are more people than Doug actually proposing actual wording. I'm convinced that we are continuing to make forward progress. Backlog of items include following up with Sun on following the licensing terms for Jasper, and a "fork FAQ".
Brief discussion concerning the possible need to change the bylaws. We decided not to pursue such a change. Approved by General Consent.
* Continuing to work on Yahoo! patent scope FAQ. * Updated web page concerning Apache License and GPL compatibility * Updated 3rd party policy, resolving Geronimo and MyFaces issue * Participated in two call with ASF council regarding JCK/FOU issue * Continuing to work with Sun over ASF license code issues in Glassfish My goal continues to be to delegate more of this. If necessary, I will recruit more people onto the legal committee in order to make this happen.
As mentioned in last month's report, I wish to resign as VP of Legal Affairs. The Legal Affairs Committee has discussed possible replacements over the last month and have reached consensus on Sam Ruby, who is not currently on the committee. Therefore, I have prepared two resolutions for the board to vote on: one to add Sam to the committee (being a board/executive committee) and one to have him replace me as VP. There are no other issues requring board attention this month.
On May 31st, the FSF released its "last call draft" of the GPLv3. In this draft and its associated press releases, the FSF prominently states that there is no longer a concern about the Apache License being "incompatible" with the GPLv3. The compatibility issue is describing whether they see a problem with an Apache-Licensed component being included within a larger GPLv3-licensed work. This is what they no longer see a problem with. Of course, there would still be much concern and debate about the licensing restrictions of a larger Apache-Licensed work that included a GPLv3-licensed component. The only other issue to report is that the legal affairs committee has been up and running for well over a month. In fact, I coordinated approval of the FSF's proposed GPLv3 wording with the committee (although sadly didn't plan far enough advance to coordinate this report). I will soon be asking the committee for nominations and an election of a new VP of Legal Affairs, with a proposed resolution before the Board by next month's meeting.
I have proposed a new Legal Affairs Committee to distribute the current legal affairs workload to a coordinated group ASF members, to assign responsibility for legal policy deliberation and decision making to the same group under the supervision of the board, and to provide a structured means of participation and familiarization for those interested in taking over the Legal VP job one day. The resolution is on the agenda. It is currently written as an Executive committee, but we can discuss if that is best. I've worked with Geir on issues related to the JCK licensing problems, but I will let him report on that.
The CLA FAQ proposed at last month's meeting was reviewed by our counsel. Small changes were made and an additional Q&A was added to clarify the future patent claims issue. The FAQs have been posted to legal-discuss where there is some discussion to make a very minor clarification. In short, I believe this issue is pretty much resolved. A pretty bad trademark violation was reported, which I forwarded to the PRC and assisted them in an initial draft (with a review through counsel).
The only issue to report this month is the patent license FAQ. Following the plan I suggested in October, I've taken the FAQ proposed by Doug and agreed to by Roy (which addresses the concern for consistency with Roy's public statements on the topic while he served as ASF Chairman) and asked our counsel to review and advise. Barring any legal concerns from counsel, I recommend posting this FAQ. Incidentally, the question part of the FAQ is nearly identical to the one proposed in our September meeting; however, the answer no longer has the problem raised by some directors (that it was attempting to answer more than the question).
CLA UPDATE: I sent an update to legal-discuss last week to
let everyone know that the plan is to publish a document
that describes the original intention behind some of the
ambiguities in the CLA and then to discuss the idea of
a new version. Roy has agreed to write the "original
intention" doc based on what statements he had made about
the CLA's interpretation while he was ASF chair.
GPLv3 COMPATIBILITY: The SFLC contacted me about the latest
proposed changes to the patent licensing in the next
draft of GPLv3. I am reviewing now to ensure these
changes would still allow Apache-Licensed works to be
included in GPLv3-licensed works.
STANDARDS LICENSING: I reviewed the BPEL specification patent
licenses for Apache ODE. The licenses would not be
acceptable by the ASF; however, there do not currently
appear to be any patents to license. So, I see no problem
with ODE implementing the BPEL spec. Another spec reviewed
was the Yahoo-submitted IETF RFC on DomainKeys. Noel
submitted this to legal-internal by Noel for review during
ApacheCon US. I reviewed and commented on it there; while
not ideal, it appears reasonable and should not hold back
our development. My analyses for both BPEL and DomainKeys
was approved by our legal counsel on legal-internal.
Cliff reported that work is continuing on the "crypto export" clarifications for use within the ASF. Also being worked on is the standards licensing. Cliff noted that SenderID is covered under the Open Specification promise, and therefore removes any restrictions on use.
Cliff reported that during ApacheCon, the CCLA issue was further discussed with many people, especially Roy and Doug Cutting. Both Roy and Doug were happy with the approach taken and Roy committed to "writing up" what his intents were with the CCLA, so that misinterpretation of the letter and spirit of the CCLA no longer exists. Cliff indicated his desire to create a sort of Legal Committee, similar to the PRC or Security Team, to allow for a wider range of volunteers to help with the various legal issues and questions still being worked on. His hope is also that this will provide an opportunity for him to resign from the VP of Legal Affairs position after a period of time. Cliff reported that a number of Universities and Colleges have contacted him regarding their own efforts in creating suitable licenses for their open source educational software. Cliff suggested that the ASF possible provide feedback and insights regarding our experiences with the AL as well as the iCLA and CCLAs.
CRYPTO EXPORT DOCS: This work has been complete for over a
month and projects are now starting to use the docs/process.
At this stage it still requires me to work closely with the
project to ensure they understand the docs, but the system
is working. This will scale better as the docs are improved
through experience.
STANDARDS LICENSING: The standards patent covenant that I have
mentioned giving feedback on over the last couple reports
was made public about one week ago: the Microsoft "Open
Specification Promise". While it is not perfect, I
believe it should not block PMCs wishing to implement
covered specifications.
USPTO/OSDL's OSAPA: The Open Source As Prior Art initiative
met in Portland, OR, last week for two days. I was able
to join the group for the second day to learn a little
about what is being planned. Will follow-up with email
to board@.
THIRD-PARTY LICENSING POLICY: Haven't gotten to this yet, but
hoping to make minor revisions and make enforcement
approach clear in doc (as described in previous reports)
and then call it final, and ideally have it included in
same email to committers as alerts on src header and
crypto docs. (No change since last month)
OSS PROJECT CODE MOVED TO ASF: When an incubating project's
initial code base is submitted to the ASF, our CLA
requires that "work that is not Your original creation"
must be submitted "separately from any Contribution,
identifying the complete details of its source and...
conspicuously marking the work as "Submitted on behalf of
a third-party: [named here]". This presents a problem
when the code base is an existing OSS project with
intermingled IP from various sources. One solution I've
seen in the past is for the multiple authors to jointly
sign the same grant; however, due to a few problems with
this approach, I've worked with one set of initial
contributors to create a script that uses svn blame/log
and a mapping file (svn id or a rev # --> legal owner) to
output an exhaustive set of annotations to satisfy this
requirement.
PATENT LICENSING IN CCLAS: I am late on getting this report
done. I'm still having discussions with our lawyers and
other members of the open source community on a daily /
weekly basis. The goals of the report are to detail the
ambiguities in the patent language of the current CCLA
and to suggest that the board consider options, such as
specific clarifications, revisions, and supplementary
processes. These can be discussed at today's meeting if
the board wishes; in addition, Doug Cutting would like the
board to consider an FAQ to address some aspect of the
CCLA's ambiguity.
Cliff also reported that he will commit to having the
3rd Party issues complete by ApacheCon Austin.
LICENSING HEADER: About to move the deadline back to Nov 1st
due to my slowness in getting out an email to committers@
pointing to new policy. However, many projects are
already switching over from pointers on legal-discuss.
CRYPTO EXPORT DOCS: Lots of work with APR and especially
James on fine-tuning the format for the email reports and
web page. Have updated the docs to reflect this. Pretty
much done now -- just need to include this on the
committers@ email (see above re: license header).
THIRD-PARTY LICENSING POLICY: Haven't gotten to this yet, but
hoping to make minor revisions and make enforcement
approach clear in doc (as described in previous reports)
and then call it final, and ideally have it included in
same email to committers as alerts on src header and
crypto docs. (No change since last month)
PATENT LICENSING IN CCLAS: I've continued to do some
research and have some discussions with various companies
and other open source organizations on this topic. I
still hope to have a report comparing the options by the
end of this month.
STANDARDS LICENSING: A large software company will be soon
be releasing a new patent license (actually a promise
not to sue), under which several specifications will be
covered. Much of our feedback has been incorporated
into the latest draft. I expect we will be satisfied
with the final result (TBA this month).
LEGAL HOME PAGE: Have created new legal home page with links
to docs relevant for users and committers. Also posting
and linking to these legal reports for interested
committers to track progress. Please let me know if
there are any concerns about this. Will publicize the
legal home page and its links on Friday in email to
committers@.
LICENSING HEADER: The final version is now posted, linked
from the new legal web page: apache.org/legal. Email to
committers will go out on Friday.
CRYPTO EXPORT DOCS: A nearly final version of this is posted
including a lengthy FAQ from various dev-list
discussions. Last step is to work with dreid on project-
specific RDF files that build final required web page.
Hoping to have this also done and in email to committers
on Friday.
THIRD-PARTY LICENSING POLICY: Haven't gotten to this yet, but
hoping to make minor revisions and make enforcement
approach clear in doc (as described in previous reports)
and then call it final, and ideally have it included in
same email to committers as alerts on src header and
crypto docs.
PATENT LICENSING IN CCLAS: I've tried to keep the board
aware enough of this discussion over the last 2-3 months
to jump in as any director sees fit; however, recent
discussions on board@ lead me to believe that I should
request this to become an item of new business, rather
than wait for another director to inquire more about it.
I suggest a brief conversation on the topic today,
followed by a more detailed presentation of the concerns
of each side of the issue at some point in the near
future.
SFLC LETTER ON ODF: After clarifying with SFLC that we did
not want their letter to represent an "Apache position"
on ODF nor did we want our name used in any PR on the
subject, I agreed to the text of their letter. Since
publishing the letter several weeks ago, they appear to
have honored my requests completely.
STANDARDS LICENSING: I continue to have conversations with
vendors on how they can improve the licensing of their
essential patent claims for specifications that Apache
would consider implementing. I'm actually seeing some
progress/willingness to revise from vendors.
LICENSING HEADER: I sent a summary of the resolution passed
at last month's meeting to the legal-discuss list and
am compiling a short FAQ based on questions from that
thread. The summary and FAQ will be linked from a new
apache.org/legal/ home page by the end of the week, and
send a notification of the posting to committers@. I
originally stated that the new header would need to be
implemented on releases on or after August 1, 2006,
but will push that date back one month, since I was slow
to get this out to all committers.
PATENT LICENSING IN CCLAS: There continues to be some degree
of controversy over my statement on how the CCLA patent
license should be interpreted. I continue to state
that the patents are licensed for both the contribution
and combinations of the contribution with the continuing
evolution of the project. In other words, the ASF is
not interested in contributions with strings attached
(strings = restrictions on what it can be combined with).
SFLC LETTER ON ODF: The SFLC has asked us to review a draft
statement on the legal encumbrances of the OASIS ODF
specification. If we agree with the draft, they would
like to issue a statement that they are representing the
positions on two of their clients, the ASF and FSF.
LICENSING HEADER: I have submitted a resolution for the
Board's consideration to set a new policy for source
code headers. In brief, the headers will no longer
include any copyright notice, only a licensing notice
and a mention of the NOTICE file for copyright info.
The NOTICE file will include the ASF's copyright notice,
in addition to other required notices. Copyright
notices in third-party components distributed within ASF
products will not be touched.
CRYPTO EXPORT POLICY: I have posted a crypto policy at
http://apache.org/dev/crypto.html. The policy should
answer most of our questions in this area, but will be
gradually enhanced over time.
GPLv3 COMPATIBILITY: After a close review of the first draft
of GPLv3, I brought up potential incompatibility issues
with the Apache License to the GPLv3 discussion committee
that I serve on. The FSF's counsel hopes these issues
can be addressed in the next draft. As I've said before,
both the FSF and the SFLC continue to be unwavering in
their dedication to ensure GPLv3 is compatible with Apache
License v2.
PATENT LICENSING IN CCLAS: I've spent a lot of time with
one particular corporate legal staff lately with their
questions of whether the CCLA implies that the set of all
possible patent claims being licensed can be known at the
time of contribution. It's obvious why a corporation
would want the answer to be affirmative; however, such an
answer would not protect the project's work from patent
infringement claims by a contributor regarding how their
contribution is combined with other things. It may be
worth revising the (C)CLA language to make this more
clear.
ELECTRONICALLY SUBMITTED AGREEMENTS: Now allowed. See the
Secretary's report.
LICENSING AUDITS: I work closely with the Eclipse Foundation's
IP Manager, who continues to inform me of apparent
inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the licensing of
ASF products. I've been asking PMCs to address these
issues as they come up, but what we really need is an
internal audit on each product to get these problems
fixed. Before we can do that, we need complete
documentation on the things an audit should look for and
how they should be corrected. I will likely make this a
priority for the "Docathon" at ApacheCon EU next month.
THIRD-PARTY IP: Due to the issues above, I've neglected to
make the few remaining changes to the draft licensing
policy doc and publish the official version. As I
mentioned last month, I intend to tell PMCs that all new
products MUST conform to the policy, but that all
existing products that do not currently conform need to
only take one action over the next six months: report
where/how they are not conforming so that the practical
impact of the policy can be better understood without
yet requiring substantial changes. The philosophy
behind this "impact evaluation period" is that the
policy was primarily intended to document the mostly
unwritten rules today and to choose one rule when
multiple exist across the ASF. Now that I've cleared
the license header and crypto issues off the high
priority list, I hope to focus exclusively (as much as
possible) on getting the 1.0 version out.
Cliff reported that the 3rd Party License report will likely be officially released later on this month (April), at which point he will start on the Copyright/Header issues. Regarding the 3rd Party License report, it is fully expected that, even though discussed and reviewed, there will be further discussions upon release. The board's stand is that we should release it "as is" and retify things if required. All new projects will need to adhere to the policy; existing projects will be given time to bring their codebases up to policy standards. The board expressed their appreciation to Cliff for a Job Well Done.
THIRD-PARTY IP: After nearly two months of review on the
board@ list and one month of review by pmcs@, I've
finally posted the latest draft of the third-party
licensing policy to the legal-discuss list. My goal
is to get all new comments or concerns collected by
the end of the month, and resolve all issues to get
a final, official, v1.0 release in April. I will
also be trying to solicit user comments through the
feather blog and a brief pointer sent to a few of
the project user lists. However, I would also like
to explicitly verify that there is a consensus from
the Board in support of the guiding principles*
behind the policy and the resulting license criteria**.
*http://people.apache.org/~cliffs/3party.html#principles
**http://people.apache.org/~cliffs/3party.html#criteria
LICENSING HEADER, ETC: Now that the third-party policy
doc is out there, my next major project is to draft
and get our counsel to approve a document that
updates our source code licensing header,
describes where to place copyright notices, various
third-party licenses, explains how to deal with
crypto export issues, and more. Although I think it
will be useful to our committers to have this all in
one document, I won't hold up getting a resolution on
the license header/copyright notice issue to wait for
the rest of the document.
GPLv3: I just finished attending the GPLv3 conference at MIT,
during which the first "discussion draft" of the GPLv3
was presented. The most relevant news is that the current
discussion draft includes a "License Compatibility"
section that allows the inclusion of Apache-Licensed (v2.0)
independent works within GPLv3-licensed programs. This
section may change within the next year, but it remains
clear that Eben and RMS will continue to make this sort
of compatibility with the Apache License a priority. The
other news is that I have accepted an invitation to
represent the ASF on one the GPLv3 "discussion committees".
THIRD-PARTY IP: I will be sending out a draft policy on third-
party IP to the board@ list this Friday, January 20th.
Cliff further reported that the Copyright Notice Policy
was still being worked on, and will be finished some time
after the completion of the 3rd Party License Policy
Report.
PATENT ISSUES: I had a second meeting with Microsoft about
possible improvements to the patent licenses that they
have stated would apply to various WS specifications at
OASIS. Details can be found in my summary post to
legal-internal on 6 Dec 05 (Message-Id:
<81007DBD-EBD8-45DC-8A35-0FB8F4F3FC11@apache.org>. I've
since asked them about the possibility of issuing a
Covenant not to enforce patent claims, similar to what they
recently did for Office 2003 Reference Schemas. No
response on that one just yet.
GPLv3 COMPATIBILITY: Eben Moglen and RMS have each personally
asked that the ASF participate in the GPLv3 input/feedback
process, primarily to help ensure compatibility between
the GPL and Apache licenses. I plan to attend the first
GPLv3 conference at MIT in January for that purpose.
THIRD-PARTY IP: After talking with 20+ ASF members at ApacheCon
about a proposed licensing policy, I am now ready to float
something formal by the membership. The short version is
that I believe we need to draw the licensing line at the
ability for our users to redistribute all parts of an
official ASF distribution under their own license, as long
as it does not violate the copyright owner's license. I'm
working up a list of how this would impact the top 30 OSI-
approved licenses and a few others, but I can tell you it
would exclude both the LGPL and the Sun Binary Code
License, which is currently used in Apache James.
LAME LIST: In prior reports I said I expected to have a policy
written on crypto export and copyright notices. I'm late
on both. I am now able to projects with the correct
procedure for crypto, but I still need to get it formally
documented.
SFLC: Justin and I had a kick-off meeting with Eben and two
of his lawyers. Justin and Greg are already working
with one of them to handle any issues with our books
and 501(c)(3) status. Justin is the point person for
this work and will be handling ongoing status in his
Treasurer's report.
BXA/CRYPTO: The Perl folks sent out the required notification
for the mod_ssl stuff. I've now taken their feedback and
drafted a process document to run through counsel. Jason
has referred me to another EFF lawyer with more crypto
export experience who has agreed to review it.
COPYRIGHT NOTICS: Our counsel will be giving one final review
on the copyright notice issue starting this Friday
(during a monthly teleconference). Should have something
ready within one week after that.
LGPL: I'm still waiting on feedback from Eben on my
Java/LGPL position paper that I sent him last month. He
wanted to refrain from giving me feedback until
discussing the matter with the FSF. I expect to have
something any day now, since that meeting should have
recently happened. I recommend we hold off any decision
to allow distribution of LGPL components within non-
incubating product JARs until getting this one last
opinion from Eben and then bouncing it off the rest of
our counsel. However, I do not think we should have any
legal concern about separately distributing the LGPL and
ASF component that depends on it; both Jason and Larry
have signed off on this question.
THIRD-PARTY IP: In the process of working on a document to
get us to a comprehensive policy on what third-party
software we will distribute and how, I have created a
little matrix to summarize the issues across the most
common licenses of interest to the ASF today. I will
send this matrix to legal-discuss list today for
discussion. It might also be helpful for discussing
how LGPL is similar and different from licenses like
the CPL and CDDL.
ASF LEGAL POLICY DOC: All these issues and more are being
written to live within a series of ASF legal policy
documents that I am hoping to have approved at or soon
after ApacheCon.
HOUSEKEEPING: I've created a new directory /foundation/legal/
Board to include all Legal reports and approved
resolutions with a README indicating that they are
compiled there for convenience and with a pointer to
the normative versions.
ADDITIONAL COUNSEL: I have signed an agreement with Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center to have them offer the ASF pro bono legal services. The first job will be to work with Justin on renewing our 501(c)(3) status and some of the thorny issues we need to resolve to get our books in order. BXA/CRYPTO: While I was working on a draft crypto policy, I was notified that the Perl PMC (and Tomcat?) may not have sent notification to the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS, formerly known as BXA). This has required me to try out specific guidance on these two projects, which will hopefully make the formal policy more robust. I'm still working with the Perl and Tomcat PMCs to help solve their immediate issues. Most of the relevant discussion has been cc'd to legal-internal. COPYRIGHT NOTICES: Last month I reported that I was getting general agreement from our counsel to move to a policy that requires only a licensing notice, but not a copyright notice at the top of each source file. I regret to say that I have made very little progress on this issue since last month. I'll have this ready for next board meeting. LGPL: Last month I reported that this issue needs to be addressed within the context of an overall policy stating what licenses are acceptable for ASF distributions to take dependencies on and distribute (see "Third Party IP" issue below). Ten days ago, I sent Eben Moglen (in his role as general counsel for the FSF) a five-page document (including a developer-focused FAQ) on my interpretation of exactly what the LGPL allows and does not allow related to Java dependencies and distribution requirements. He has not given me feedback on this yet, but has been talking about releasing a similar position paper on behalf of the FSF. THIRD-PARTY IP: Last month I reported that most of the licenses we thought we could sublicense under the Apache License (including the CPL) can really only be distributed under their own license. So, we now need to figure out what makes a license okay to include in an Apache distribution. I've made very little progress on this in the last month, but I hope to have a policy written, discussed, and ready for approval by the December board meeting. ASF LEGAL POLICY DOC: Although I did not make as much progress as I'd hoped on the copyright notice and third-party IP issues over the last month, I did write up and outline for an overall legal policy doc to address these issues and others. The outline (including a brief preview of where the document was probably headed) was sent to legal-discuss.
COPYRIGHT NOTICES: I have gotten Jason, Larry, Robyn, and even Eben Moglen to all agree that we should be fine with no copyright notice at the top of each source file, and instead just include a licensing notice similar to what Roy recently posted to the Board@ list. The issue that isn't quite solved yet is the mechanics of ensuring any COPYRIGHT file or section of the NOTICE file is in sync with the CLAs and agreements from outside contributors. BXA/CRYPTO: I now have an understanding of the open source exception to the crypto export requirements. I've read through the relevant docs at bxa.doc.gov, eff.org, and a legal opinion from McGlashan & Sarrail dated September 13, 2000, which I found in /foundation/Records/BXA. There was a minor (generally favorable) change to the TSU exception (the one that applies to open source) last December. The bottom line is that there appears to be no problem with distributing source or binaries as long as we give appropriate notice to the BXA/BIS. My next step is to get an updated opinion from Jason and publish guidelines to PMCs. LGPL: There's the legal requirements side of this issue and the policy side (as with so many things). I believe I have already completed the due dilligence on the legal requirements side; however, during conversations with Eben Moglen I've found that he plans to publish a document that is explicit about the issues or non-issues with Java and the LGPL. I will be sending him my view of these issues this week, which I hope will influence what ends up in his document. On the policy side, we need to stop treating the LGPL differently from other licenses, and instead determine what our policy is for taking dependencies on and distributing third-party IP. THIRD-PARTY IP: Any time we bring in third-party IP that is not licensed under the Apache License, we have two choices: a) sublicense the work under the Apache License (if we have the rights to do so), or b) distribute the Apache product under each applicable license and make that clear to our users. We've been trying to say we're only doing a) so far. However, in my view we are obviously not consistently doing this, nor do I think it is practical to do so. So, I'm now thinking the best way to address issues of shipping CPL, MPL, CDDL, LGPL, etc. is to stop trying to sublicense them under the Apache License and instead create and implement a policy that allows us to distribute products that contain IP under some set of license terms (including terms outside the scope of the Apache License).
I've inserted slightly edited versions of the same MPL/NPL
and LGPL resolutions, which were tabled last month.
Since last month's meeting, I have:
- confirmed with a second member of ASF's legal counsel
that the proposed LGPL policy does not put our product
licensing at risk;
- posted and discussed the proposed LGPL policy on the
legal-discuss list, where no new concerns were raised
about the licensing ramifications; however there was
concern raised by both outside lawyers and Apache
committers that dependencies on LGPL libraries was not
in the best interests of some Apache users;
- engaged with representatives of the Mozilla Foundation
to discuss the proposed MPL/NPL licensing policy. While
they have *not* yet formally indicated their agreement
with our interpretation, they have not yet raised any
new concerns.
Future action items include resolving the BXA/crypto issue
and investigating and proposing policies for the CPL, EPL,
and CDDL licenses.
Finally, one of my short-term objectives is to overhaul the
legal STATUS file to reflect the current priorities and
status.
See Special Orders for two proposed resolutions.
The first resolution allows PMCs to develop and distribute
software that depends on the presence of LGPL-licensed
libraries, *without* distributing the libraries themselves.
After numerous discussions with the FSF, other LGPL licensors,
and ASF counsel, Larry Rosen, it appears that such a policy
should not impact the product licensing. In order to allow
PMCs to apply this policy to all useful LGPL-licensed
libraries, the resolution does not require the PMCs to get
an agreement from each copyright owner, but instead requires
the PMC to register the use of the particular LGPL library
with the VP of Legal Affairs. See my post to the board@
list for more details ("My recommendation for an ASF policy on
the LGPL").
The second resolution allows PMCs to redistribute MPL/NPL-
licensed executables. The key difference between the MPL/NPL
and the LGPL regarding redistribution requirements is that the
MPL/NPL allows redistribution under any license (provided that
the distributor complies with the applicable terms of the
MPL/NPL); the LGPL requires redistribution of either the source
or executable of the library to be licensed only under the LGPL.
While the MPL 1.0, MPL 1.1, NPL 1.0, and NPL 1.1 are nearly
identical in their treatment of redistribution of executables,
it is important to note that the NPL licenses are not OSI-
approved, as they discriminate in favor of Netscape, weakening
the terms that Netscape has to comply with relative to other
users. See my post to the board@ list for more details ("MPL/NPL
Issue: My recommendation for an ASF policy on the MPL/NPL").
NOTE: Larry Rosen has agreed with my analysis of the MPL/NPL
licenses as described in the referenced post; however, yesterday
he suggested that I confirm that Mitchell Baker also agrees
(author of the licenses). I have not yet received her response.
This could be a reason to table this resolution.