[Tinyos-alliance] Apache licensing

[Matt Welsh]

It is worth noting that the FSF and Apache Foundation hold different
views of this.

The FSF's position is here:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/

It is rather vague but simply says that Apache is incompatible with the
GPL.

Apache's is here:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/licence-FAQ.html#GPL

Quoting from the Apache pages:

"Is the Apache license compatible with the GPL (GNU Public License)?

It is the unofficial position of The Apache Software Foundation that the
Apache license is compatible with the GPL. However, the Free Software
Foundation holds a different position, although we have not been able to
get them to give us categorical answers to our queries asking for
details on just what aspects they consider incompatible.

Whether to mix software covered under these two different licenses must
be a determination made by those attempting such a synthesis."


Matt






On Thu, 2006-02-02 at 10:23 -0800, Philip Levis wrote:
> I realize that the teleconference notes are probably only scratch the
> surface of what is said, but I was reading through the notes on the
> source licensing discussion and noticed that an important point -- in
> fact, the reason why TinyOS has remained BSD rather than Apache --
> didn't come up. If it was mentioned but didn't make it into the notes,
> feel free to ignore the rest of this message.
> 
> The basic problem is that Apache is incompatible with the GPL.
> Historically, BSD actually used to have attribution requirements, but
> they were removed after the GPL became popular, so that the two could
> co-exist. The problem stems from the fact that the GPL requires that no
> additional stipulations be put on code beyond its own, while Apache
> introduces the stipulation of attribution. The combination of an
> immovable object and an irresistible force means that two can't coexist.
> 
> This becomes especially tricky due to the way that TinyOS compiles. The
> LGPL, for example, allows linking, but in TinyOS there is no linking:
> nesC generates a large C file so the compiler can optimize across call
> boundaries.
> 
> This means that if the TinyOS core had an Apache license, no one could
> release GPL code for it, nor could they release code that included GPL'd
> libraries. Similarly, if the TinyOS core had a GPL license, nobody could
> release Apache code for it. Rather than limit the licenses of the users
> of TinyOS, the conclusion was that the core reference implementation
> should be BSD, which can work fine with either. On top of this code,
> people are welcome to use any license they want.
> 
> Food for thought,
> 
> Phil
> 
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