THIS IS A DRAFT. IT MAY NOT BE ENTIRELY CORRECT
(For FAQ information concerning LGPL in particular, see Using_LGPL'd_code)
A list of licences other than the Apache v1 and v2 licences, and whether they may be used by Jakarta (and other ASF projects by implication) sub-projects.
For a full range of potential open-source licences, see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/. Also see http://wiki.apache.org/old/Licensing.
Summary
Nothing on this page is ratified by the board of the ASF, it merely represents our current understanding.
Licence
importable
downloadable
Commentary
BSD
Yes
Yes
According to legal-discuss@apache.org is officially ok.
MIT
Yes
Yes
GPL
No
No
LGPL
No
No
The LGPL's intent is that it could be usable, but the legalese is too poor
IBM CPL
Yes
Yes
CPL'd source may not be on the ASF servers however.
Sun BCL
Yes
Maybe
Shall not be independently downloadable from ASF servers. May be packaged with a distribution
Sun SCSL
Yes
No
LPPL (Latex)
No
No
Demands restrictions the ASL cannot provide
MPL
Yes
Yes
(confirm. 1.0, 1.1 different?)
Public domain
Yes
Yes
Antlr and Doug Lea's concurrency package in particular
Work-around ideas
- A plugin architecture can get around this, however the plugins cannot be a part of the ASF in anyway. Also, the licensing of the plugins may be intricate.
- Footnotes/disclaimers being added to the non-usable licences might allow us to use them.
- Ask the maintainer of the library to dual-license under an acceptable license.
Comments
HowardLewisShip: I was under the impression that the ASF forbade downloading any code that did not originate within the ASF. I wish I had a reference. Tapestry and HiveMind download all their dependencies from the Maven repository. I'd also love to see an explicit clarification about Hibernate and its wacky license since Hibernate integration examples are probably the #1 demand from both the Tapestry and HiveMind communities.