[antlr-interest] licensing stuff

Oliver Zeigermann oliver at zeigermann.de
Thu Feb 5 11:40:16 PST 2004


I am involved in a project hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. 
Every contributor and committer has to sign an agreement and fax it to 
them where he has to declare every thing contributed or checked into the 
CVS will be under the ASF license. In case of patches it is common 
practice to simply apply them as every file has a header with the 
complete license. Also contributions are only accepted when they - at 
the time of the contribution - have exactly this header.

This does not seem to be a solution to the 2.7.x problem, but might be a 
way to go for 3.x or 2.8.x.

Oliver

Terence Parr wrote:
> Howdy.  My intention has always been to publish work without 
> restrictions of any kind so that nobody has to talk to a lawyer to use 
> my work.  That was 15 years ago.  Now, some people won't use my 
> software BECAUSE it has no restriction!  Kinda cracks me up.  I'm being 
> punished for my generosity.  There have been a HUGE number of incoming 
> patches over 15 years and it's too late to get formal emails from all 
> of them.  Some are surely retired persons and off email like Knuth ;)  
> Programmers understand what public domain means and they don't expect 
> any compensation for patches.
> 
> Anyway, I get email regularly from lawyers at IBM and other big places 
> that are used to suing everyone (a pox on their families).  They then 
> worry that they will be sued by everyone.  This is a fact I cannot 
> change.  Lawyers don't get that software patents and all the related 
> heinousness is anathema to the anarchistic cooperative programming 
> community (just my opinion, btw).  Programmers love to help each other; 
> look at jGuru and the ilk.  When was the last time a lawyer helped out 
> another one for free?
> 
> ANTLR 3.0 will be BSD license, however, this won't prevent issues 
> raised in this thread: that contributors will come after users of the 
> software for compensation.  BSD says "do what you want, but don't sue 
> me".  Does this cover contributors?  I doubt it; only the original 
> author is covered.  Do we need to modify it to say "any contributions 
> acquire automatically the BSD license?"  Probably not since some lawyer 
> will simply argue that that is not legal or some crap.
> 
> Anyway, there is no good solution.  The more we tighten up BSD or some 
> other license, the more it will become necessary to consult the devil 
> to use the software!  I hate this issue. :(  I've been wondering how to 
> build a formal contributors list for 3.0 and perhaps we can add wording 
> explicitly transferring ownership to me so that I can say I don't own 
> it.  Bizarre.  After these sorts of discussions, it makes me want to do 
> every line of code myself for 3.0.
> 
> A final note: people, please check the "license" on software before you 
> use it.  I had to carefully read licenses for using Lucene, Resin, 
> etc... when building jGuru.  Do it *before*, not *after*.
> 
> Thanks for your time and thanks for using ANTLR even though we're all 
> going to be sued :(
> 
> Regards,
> Terence
> --
> Professor Comp. Sci., University of San Francisco
> Creator, ANTLR Parser Generator, http://www.antlr.org
> Co-founder, http://www.jguru.com
> Co-founder, http://www.knowspam.net enjoy email again!
> Co-founder, http://www.peerscope.com pure link sharing
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  
> Yahoo! Groups Links
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 





 
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