Hi Curt,
I've already replied to your "Dependencies in SVN" thread in more
depth on couchdb-dev@ [1] so I'll only repeat the essentials here.
To summarise: Niclas is correct in that there is no problem with
bundling third-party dependencies with an ASF project as long as their
licenses are all ASL-compatible. I have authoritative comments on
this from legal-discuss@ and it has been added to the ASF Legal
"Previously Asked Questions" page: http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html
(although it may take a while before it synchronises from SVN).
If you have any further questions about this please bring it up on the
couchdb-dev@ mailing list, or if you need further clarification about
legal matters, please bring it up on legal-discuss@ as suggested below.
[1]: http://markmail.org/message/lxxb6cfpq7rhc2sl
Thanks,
--
Jason Davies
www.jasondavies.com
On 9 Aug 2009, at 11:54, Niclas Hedhman wrote:
Curt,
Two things come to my mind immediately, and this is without reading
your
references (might do that when I'm back at a computer).
1. CouchDb graduated long ago, and is no longer the concern of the
Incubator
in particular. If you have legal concerns that the CouchDb doesn't
want to
address, I suggest you seek further info from legal-discuss, and if
it isn't
of legal nature, go to the Board or Membership with the concerns...
2. Speaking from a legal perspective, there is nothing "at Apache"
that
prevents people for doing source code copy, in small or large (a.k.a
forks),
PROVIDED that the license allows it. I saw you mentioning BSD
(modified I
hope) and MIT X, and those licenses require attribution and few other
things, so if that is done, there is no legal contention here. Now
you said
that Apache doesn't fork... well the reason behind that (I think) is
that we
are all lazy, it takes a lot of energy to maintain forks. And we
don't do it
to compete with the original project, out of courtesy... is that your
complaint?
I appreciate your concerns, just target the right audience and
preferably
with the invitation of the CouchDb PMC...
-- Niclas
On Aug 9, 2009 5:48 PM, "Curt Arnold" <carn...@apache.org> wrote:
I've been using CouchDB in my personal development and have recently
started
trying to get up to speed with the project itself. I've brought up
a few
issues on d...@couchdb.apache.org where I encountered things that
were a bit
unsettling. There has been follow up discussion, but no resolution
and no
one who can speak authoritatively on where the line is on certain
issues.
A recent patch introduced the source code of a BSD-licensed project
(erlang_oauth) into the CouchDB SVN. There was no mention of the
addition
of the dependency in the patch and the license file for the project
was not
included (which required including the license and disclaimers).
Digging a
little more, I found that another non-ASL code base (ibrowse) was
added to
the SVN in January, again with missing license, no notice in the
submission,
traffic in the mailing list. There is a third code base (mochiweb)
that was
in the source during incubation which was noted in the April 2008
board
report:
On Apr 14, 2008, at 11:07 AM, Noel J. Bergman wrote:
....
=== CouchDB ===
CouchDB is a distributed document-oriented database system written in
Erlang. The project entered incubation on February 12th, 2008.
The infrastructure (SVN, JIRA, mailing lists, and web-site) has
been set
up,
and the team has moved source, documentation, and bug reports from
their
former homes to the ASF.
Work has continued on removing code forked from other projects from
the
CouchDB codebase. This includes Mozilla !SpiderMonkey, the code for
which
was previously included with CouchDB in slightly modified form.
Instead, it
is now treated as an external compile-time dependency via a custom C
wrapper
using the !SpiderMonkey API. Also, work is currently in progress on
replacing the dependency on a forked version of `inets`, which is
part of
the Erlang standard library (EPL), with the MIT-licensed !MochiWeb
library.
For the time being, the !MochiWeb code is included in the CouchDB
codebase,
mostly because there has been no official release of that library
yet.
That point indicated that the direction was to remove external
codebases
from the CouchDB source tree. The mochiweb and ibrowse have slightly
diverged from the base project, so in essence (but not likely in
intent)
CouchDB has forked those projects.
I requested that the erlang_oauth commit be reverted until we had a
clarification, but no action has been taken.
The second issue is that there seemed to be a recurring pattern of
significant contributors using Github for feature branches. This
raised the
possibility of the resulting patch not being the work of a single
individual
and also removed the development history from the archives.
I reported these issues in the following threads:
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/200908.mbox/%3c8f366a4d-a8d0-44d1-a9d2-4f067f386...@apache.org%3e
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/200908.mbox/%3c98e3034d-2595-4fbe-ae6e-991affa64...@apache.org%3e
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/200908.mbox/%3c29420cca-62bf-424e-a03d-6b376a0d9...@apache.org%3e
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/200908.mbox/%3c399a2534-fbbb-4d0e-a7c9-a04ab0e17...@apache.org%3e
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/200908.mbox/%3c00d13141-2cee-42b2-87ce-81fba695e...@apache.org%3e
The current question is:
On Aug 8, 2009, at 1:39 PM, Paul Davis wrote:
..
Maybe its just me but I haven't the slightest what problem this
thread
is trying to solve. Why would we even think about removing our
runtime
dependencies from SVN? I know someone suggested it in thread this
conversation forked from but I never read discussion about why this
would be good or necessary.
I'm having problems pointing to a definitive statement that says
that these
are things that an Apache project doesn't do, but am struggling to
come up
with anything definitive.
I would appreciate review of these threads and appropriate
participation
from the Incubator PMC.
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