Apache Third-Party IP Policies

[Lawrence Rosen <lr...@rosenlaw.com>]

To: European Legal Network

 

Some of you know that I am an elected member of The Apache Software
Foundation and a previous member of its Board of Directors, but please
remember that I do not represent them as an attorney or otherwise. What I
say in this and subsequent emails here is merely public information copied
from a publicly archived email list at Apache, legal-discuss@apache.org, and
my own words and thoughts. Apache is not responsible for, nor will many of
its members appreciate, what I write here.

 

The Apache Software Foundation is a precious public resource that plays an
important role in the FOSS ecosystem. Under a very permissive open source
license, we publish lots of very valuable software that others can use,
modify, and incorporate freely into their own software. 

 

Apache is a publisher of software, but we don't write most of it ourselves.
We collect and compile contributions from third parties - our worldwide
community of members and contributors - and then publish those collections
and compilations as "Apache" projects. 

 

Internally to the Foundation, I continue to raise important (to me)
questions about Apache policies and procedures relating to those third party
contributions. But many of you third parties aren't yourselves paying much
attention to those discussions. I'm getting feedback from a very narrow
group of my fellow members, mostly non-lawyers. This is valuable input, of
course, but it reminds me sometimes of being in the inner circle at a
political rally; that isn't really the best place to view the entire
political arena.

 

So I'm bringing some of those Apache public discussions here to this list,
where I can share my pain with my fellow lawyers around the world. But
mostly, I want to get legal feedback from others' perspectives.

 

I'll be sending messages to this list from time to time (3 of them in the
next few hours). They describe legal issues that relate to third party
contributions to Apache. I will welcome your feedback. I'll share your
emails within Apache *only* if you allow me to do so (on a
message-by-message basis, in accordance with our privacy rules on this
list). 

 

Or better still, you can just subscribe to legal-discuss@apache.org and join
the public conversations yourself. We use JIRA for issue tracking. My
collection of issues is JIRA LEGAL-168, but other JIRA LEGAL- issues may
interest you if you are one of the millions of people or companies or
governments around the world who contribute to and benefit from Apache
software. Feel free to sign up. The public archives are here:
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-legal-discuss/. 

 

Best regards,

 

/Larry

 

[This specific email may be freely copied]

 

bcc: legal-discuss@apache.org [will not receive future emails]

bcc: Apache Board of Directors [will not receive future emails]

 

Lawrence Rosen

Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com
<http://www.rosenlaw.com/> )

3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482

Office: 707-485-1242

Linkedin profile: http://linkd.in/XXpHyu