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Subject: Re: Requesting a license to commercial software for testing
From: Robert Burrell Donkin <rdonkin@apache.org>
To: legal-discuss@apache.org
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Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:09:57 +0000
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On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 15:21 -0500, Wes Wannemacher wrote:
> Hello,
>=20
> I am a committer on the apache struts project. Lately, we have been
> having problems with the IBM WebSphere application server. WebSphere
> has a community edition (open source), but it is based on open source
> application servers (Geronimo, Tomcat / Jetty). I am wondering if I
> can request a license for WebSphere from them for myself (and the
> struts team) to use for integration testing. I have the hardware and
> bandwidth to do it, but I don't want to cause problems by requesting
> something on behalf of an Apache project. WebSphere is quite common,
> and Struts is quite common as well, so if I can get in contact with
> the right people there, I think they will see the value in allowing us
> to test with their software.

ok

> My question is whether or not this presents any legal problems... Do I
> need to specifically request that the license be granted to the ASF?

IMHO apache doesn't really want or need a commercial WebSphere license

> If the software is licensed to the ASF, do I need to install and run
> the software on ASF hardware? If I want to forgo the formalities and
> ask for the software for myself, will that get me in trouble?

my advice is to approach the (right) WebSphere people with your problem
("I'm a struts committer and I need to do WebSphere integration testing
for reasons XYZ") and let them suggest a solution. they might be able to
find you an account on one of their servers, grant you a developer
license (IIRC i was issued one of these a few years ago to debug an
WebSphere issue with one of the apache libraries i worked on), suggest
that apache is granted some sort of non-commercial license, or whatever.

if it's something that requires official involvement then come back with
their proposal

- robert

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