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Re: VOCAL (Vovidia Communications License)



Don Armstrong wrote:

> On Tue, 04 May 2004, Branden Robinson wrote:
>> Does anyone know if the latest version of the Apache Software
>> License still retains these terms?
> 
> No, thankfully Apache Source License v 2.0 ditched them for the more
> sane (and more to the point) §6:
> 
>      6. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the
>      trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the
>      Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in
>      describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the
>      NOTICE file.[1]
>  
> Which is probably what the license should have said in the beginning.
Heh.  :-)

> [We probably should really review Apache Source License v 2.0
> sometime... §3 (patent reciprocity) and §4d (acknowledgements in the
> NOTICE file) are two clauses that are near the border, and while I
> think they're free, I'm interested in others opinions of them.[2]]
> 
> 
> Don Armstrong
> 
> 1: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
> 2: I know we discussed §3 when it was proposed, but it's
> interesting... §4d may also be important to discuss, especially in the
> context of droit d' auter and in the context of free documentation
> licenses.

I remember giving the Apache Foundation detailed amendments to 4d (which
they adopted) so as to make it non-objectionable.  I think it's
sufficiently free.  It's *very* narrowly tailored to forestall a lot of
problems, unlike similar clauses in other licenses.

Similarly for section 3; sentence 1 is a permission grant, while sentence 2
is very narrowly tailored to protect the freedom of the Work itself, rather
than just to attack software patents in general -- it prevents a particular
scheme which could otherwise be successfully used by a patent-holder to
make other people's work proprietary to the patent-holder.

-- 
There are none so blind as those who will not see.



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