Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-say-no dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The Apache Foundation has declared that none of its new software projects can include Facebook's booby-trapped BSD-licensed code.

The foundation's legal affairs director, Chris Mattmann, said over the weekend that libraries, frameworks and tools covered by Facebook's open-source-ish BSD-plus-Patents license should not be absorbed into any new projects.

"No new project, sub-project or codebase, which has not used Facebook BSD+Patents licensed jars (or similar), are allowed to use them," Mattmann wrote. "In other words, if you haven't been using them, you aren't allowed to start. It is Cat‑X."

The Cat‑X or "Category X" classification means a library is not allowed to be included with any Apache product.

Additionally, he said, any existing projects that rely on the BSD+Patents licensed libraries will have until August 31 to get rid of Facebook's code and find a suitable replacement that has been approved by the foundation.

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/17/apache_says_no_to_facebook_code_libraries/


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:21PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:21PM (#541108) Journal

    Actually stopping to skim TFA and click links, it seems RocksDB is planning to change licenses over this: [apache.org]

    Hi all, wanted to jump in here to let everyone know that the RocksDB team is adjusting the licensing such that it will be dual-licensed under the Apache 2 and GPL 2 (for MySQL compatibility) licenses. This should happen shortly and well ahead of August 31st. I'll leave the history and philosophy around licensing alone since it's generally a complex discussion to have and I'm not sure that it has actually been fully captured in this thread especially vis a vis Facebook's intent.
    Hopefully this morning's guidance to PMCs can be adjusted since I don't think any of us see a bunch of extra engineering effort as a desirable thing across the ASF projects which are already making use of RocksDB
    Thanks,
    --David

    React is supposedly planning internal discussions, [github.com] but preparing the True Believers for disappointment:

    To give you a small update, there are going to be more internal discussions about this for about a week. This is about as much as I can say. I wouldn't be too optimistic about this changing for React but we'll see. @daveman692 has kindly agreed to provide an update when these discussions are over.

    Thanks, Apache.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2