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/
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday July 19 2017, @02:57AM
If the code is covered by patents. It's inherently not free, at least in the USA.
And as usual. Facebook tries to nestle their ways into others and control them. Seems this time they got hit on their fingers.