Re: Review of proposed Apache License, version 2.0

[Jason Wies <ja...@xc.net>]

There is still one area that needs clarification.

On Wed, Dec 24, 2003 at 04:16:06AM -0800, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>   1. Definitions.
>	"Contribution" shall mean any ___original___ work of
>	authorship,  including the original version of the Work and any
>	modifications or additions to that Work or Derivative Works thereof,
>	that is intentionally submitted to Licensor for inclusion in the Work
>	by the copyright owner ___or by an individual or Legal Entity
>	authorized to submit on behalf of the copyright owner___.

>    5. Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state  
>	otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for
>	inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms
>	and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or
>	conditions.  Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede
>	or  modify the terms of any separate license agreement you may have
>	executed with Licensor regarding such Contributions. ___You should not
>	submit as a "Contribution" any work that is not Your original
>	creation___.

By stating "original" work you most likely are trying to avoid
submissions of strictly licensed code that can't be legally used.  I
think that case is covered by rest of that section, and certainly
submissions of code not written recently or not written with Apache in
mind are still welcome (e.g. compression algorithms, fast lookup code,
etc.).  "Original work" seems to exclude those contributions, if not
legally then in spirit.

And the last sentence of section 5 doesn't match up with the
definition of Contribution.  Submitting good code that doesn't happen
to be your original creation should be encouraged, so long as the
authorization to submit in section 1 is obtained or permitted by
license.

Jason