Hey Fippo,
Hey all,
As you all know Blue Jimp has joined Atlassian. With this new
partnership, we are making changes, due to expected growth - thanks to
more eyes than ever on the Jitsi Community.
The first update we will be making is that we are changing our license.
In order to lower adoption barriers, Blue Jimp is switching to the
Apache license and contributor agreement.
[...]
Switching to Apache ends our advantage in this regard, and allows
everyone to use, integrate and distribute Jitsi with a lot less
limitations.
I'd note that you had also switched from MIT to Apache for meet.
This has been reverted now (thank you),
This was only temporary though as we needed to consult with legal
counsel. We will be bringing the change back shortly.
but I think the rationale you give
here does not apply.
True. That's an exception. In the case of Meet there is no similar
privilege to give up. The main reason for the change there is
consistency. As the potential maintainer of a large number of open
source projects, it would be unreasonably hard for Atlassian to have
to manage them under a variety of licenses and contributor agreements.
Apache is more restrictive than MIT.
Could you please be more specific about the restrictions you are
referring to? Better yet, could you please give examples that
specifically apply to Jitsi Meet?
I have heard Apache being preferred to BSD and MIT because it (Apache)
is apparently a better-framed legal document/contract. It uses
terminology that maps to defined categories of IP, like copyright and
patent, and has the required language. MIT and BSD are good at showing
the intent behind the license but do not use the technical legal
language to do it.
If anything, there's an argument that under Apache, the licensee's
rights are actually a little broader in that it includes an explicit
patent license.
(Both of these points are being made in the post that George linked to
earlier in the thread)
If you add copyright notice to existing individual files, I do not think it
is sufficient to add just the new license and copyright owner as it was done
in some commits which are now reverted
We’ll also be using DocuSign for the Apache Contributor License
Agreement, so we need all existing contributors to sign the Apache CLA,
but thanks to DocuSign, signing up for the new license will be just a
few clicks.
IANAL, but don't you need this agreement before making changes? To me the
bluejimp CLA looks like you might not actually so you can avoid a multi-year
period of waiting for agreement,
Yes, this is correct. This is where the BlueJimp CLA comes into play.
The one exception being the Jitsi Meet pre-fork part of the code. The
difference there is that that code was originally MIT. The whole point
about MIT is that it allows you to redistribute under "whatever".
"Whatever" including proprietary licenses or, obviously, other open
source licenses like Apache.
but asking reasonably is more polite.
I have personally been hearing complaints about our use of LGPL for
*years*! I wouldn't have imagined that a switch to the more permissive
Apache would elicit anything but enthusiasm.
We live to learn.
Still, let's clarify something important.
We are all free to make our own choices.
The future of Jitsi as an open source project is very important to
Atlassian. The company believes that Apache is the best license for
this future and it is eager to contribute its resources and maintain
the project under the Apache software license. Everyone who agrees is
welcome to continue helping us.
Everyone who disagrees with the choice of the new license, and does
not wish to be a part of it under such conditions, is very much
welcome to take yesterday's version of the corresponding Jitsi
projects under the terms of the LGPL, fork them and continue
maintaining it under that license.
At the end of the day, we are all free to decide how we spend our own time.
I am not telling you where to invest yours. Please, don't tell me what
to do with mine.
Emil
···
On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 9:47 PM, Philipp Hancke <fippo@goodadvice.pages.de> wrote:
Am 18.06.2015 um 01:25 schrieb Emil Ivov: