Mailing-List: contact legal-discuss-help@apache.org; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: legal-discuss@apache.org
Received-SPF: pass (nike.apache.org: domain of cbergstrom@pathscale.com
 designates 209.85.220.49 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <526FDC6A.7060605@osunix.org>
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 23:03:54 +0700
From: "=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22C=2E_Bergstr=F6m=22?=" <cbergstrom@pathscale.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; SunOS i86pc;
 rv:17.0) Gecko/20130802 Thunderbird/17.0.8
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: legal-discuss@apache.org
CC: Lawrence Rosen <lrosen@rosenlaw.com>, members@apache.org
Subject: Re: Apache's Third Party Licensing Policy
References: <001501ced4b9$f4b56550$de202ff0$@rosenlaw.com>
In-Reply-To: <001501ced4b9$f4b56550$de202ff0$@rosenlaw.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

On 10/29/13 10:17 PM, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
>
> Dear Apache Members,
>
> Certain board members accuse me of using the board@ list unreasonably 
> to argue that board officers are not acting appropriately regarding 
> certain legal issues:
>
> > Larry is abusing his privilege to interact on this list.  I suggest we
>
> > all decline to respond further.
>
> I will honor their request, but instead I will take this to 
> legal-discuss@ (a public list) and members@ (an internal list).
>
> In particular, I made this request which the Board has refused to 
> respond to:
>
> I challenge you to find anywhere on our website the written "policy" 
> that Sam invoked to delay a decision about this and other third party 
> license issues that I raised in LEGAL-179 /and/ several previous JIRA 
> issues. "Policy" DOES NOT MEAN "the VP of Legal Affairs decided". You 
> should quit inventing policy as you go along.
>
> Can anyone else among our members please help us find authority for 
> these actions by the VP of Legal Affairs? I've never seen that 
> officer's actual role described, certainly not in any way that would 
> provide written guidance for the "policy" that he invokes. I'd like to 
> see something consistent with our mission statement: "The Foundation 
> provides an established framework for intellectual property...."
>
> By the way, I've changed the topic of this thread. After this brouhaha 
> in Apache, W3C is quietly withdrawing its efforts to experiment with 
> CC-BY. Their representatives have advised me to give up the fight. :-) 
> Someone must have won this battle! But Apache keeps losing, because we 
> still refuse all attempts to lead the FOSS world in defining what our 
> Third Party Licensing Policy ought to be. Our VP of Legal Affairs 
> insists that the "policy" is to sit back and wait until a project asks 
> about a license, then approve or disapprove the license based on ad 
> hoc rules but no intelligible written principles or guidelines.
>
> For those of you who have written me publicly or privately begging me 
> to stop bothering you about this topic because you want to get back to 
> programming, sorry but no. Next year will mark my 20th year as an 
> attorney working in support of FOSS. I assume that my leadership on 
> these issues was why I was elected as a member of The Apache Software 
> Foundation in the first place. Telling me to shut up about 
> intellectual property issues of open source and open standards is like 
> cheating me of oxygen. I won't let it happen.
>
> /Larry
>
> P.S. I recognize that I won't get many /public/ statements of support 
> for this email. But please, those of you who have the courage to do 
> so, please write me privately with your comments. Pro or con, it will 
> help me resist this plea from board members that I should "shut up" 
> about legal issues.
>
Isn't a case-by-case analysis a reasonable way to deal with this issue? 
(I don't know if my understanding is perfectly clear with what's really 
happening - seems like this best describes it from your email)
-----
Looking at it another way - has the current "informal" handling of this 
ever failed or produced an undesirable outcome? Larry - if you fail - 
what's the doomsday outcome? (If it ain't toooo broken - don't fix it?)

You seem very passionate about this and keep your friends and allies 
happy - the carrot approach may take more time, but could be the best 
way to win in the long term... If there's no critical need *right now* - 
Let it go for a bit and revisit when people have the patience to engage 
again..

Sorry I can't be of more help

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: legal-discuss-unsubscribe@apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: legal-discuss-help@apache.org