Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
The Apache License (v2) has a dangerous interpretation (taoeffect.com)
27 points by itistoday2 on Sept 15, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 20 comments



Apache has had an FAQ about this for years that deals with exactly this issue:

http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#PatentScop...

Almost every company that has adopted the CLA (which is a lot) takes this view.

This is essentially a non-issue in practice.


IANAL. Seriously, IANAL.

The language limits itself to cases where a patent is necessarily infringed by combining the contribution with the product. The scenario in the guy's PDF (also--PDF?) is that an infringement is created later that has nothing to do with his contribution.

Also, as others said, 1) if Apache wrote the agreement and says that others' future contributions can't give them a license to other patents, and indications are that people rely on that interpretation, it doesn't seem like a court would read it otherwise, and 2) generally, courts aren't dumb, and they're going to look at the purpose and context of the agreement and realize this is essentially about ensuring you can't taint a project with your invention and then sue for patent infringement, and avoid reading in broader meanings.

Going a little further, maybe too far, the paragraph is in the present tense--"you hereby grant," etc. Nothing in there about your future work like you might find in, say, the IP part of an employment contract.

Given that, I have a hard time seeing how your contribution in Sep 2013 binds you to license an idea that, since it didn't exist yet and nobody talked about future inventions, neither you nor the other party could've been contemplating.

(On the other hand, if there was an idea embodied in your Sep 2013 contribution that merely wasn't patented or assigned to you yet, both parties could have been considering potential patents of the idea when reading the language. So Apache's answer A2 is justifiable.)

Finally, I have little sympathy with people's desires to be able to enforce patents against open-source projects anyway, so yeah. While the language is friendly enough to patentholders, I almost wish it weren't. :)


Lots of IANAL comments here. IAAL :)

My statement of "non-issue in practice" was based on being an open source lawyer and having talked with a large number of companies who use Apache based CLA's (including the one i work for, though i'm not speaking for them here) over the years.

While there are questions about "claims that later become licensable", i have not seen any lawyers question the scope of the grant and claim it would cover patents implicated by the work except as it existed at time of contribution (and folks are generally aware of the 'ambiguity' that exists here). There are good legal reasons to believe the interpretation would be "as the work existed at time of contribution", and no good legal reasons i'm aware of to believe otherwise.

If it actually goes bad at some point, sure, it should be modified. There are no indications it's worth doing any more than wordsmithing any other part of the agreement.

Hence, my view: This is not a problem in practice.


Glad to see DannyBee here. IAAL too, also specializing in open source. Danny is correct about the prevailing interpretation. I don't see this as an issue.


Feel free to join the discussion on the ASF legal list! :)

https://twitter.com/taoeffect/status/379227928573124608


Sure, but you must realize the ASF changing things would not impact much of anything, since the agreement is reused (with very slight differences) by hundreds of folks.

In fact, in some ways, you are better off with them not changing it, because if they do, now you have to argue they changed it but they didn't really think that change mattered ...


I don't believe a single stated "No" in the FAQ will be very meaningful, except to point out that even the creators of the license failed to notice the loophole.

Edit: Also, the fact that the interpretation can exist and is in written form is what suddenly makes it an issue, at the very least for anyone going forward. (IANAL)


That does seem to address the matter. IANAL, but I would expect that a court would take the published FAQ entry into account if the question were ever raised, given that the ASF is here interpreting its own agreement.


This is about the ASF Contributor License Agreement, not the Apache License itself.


Quoting SEMW: Venturing just a little further than the title, into the first paragraph, we come across a (large, boldfaced) edited addition to the effect that "All of this applies to the regular Apache License (v2) as well".


So this posting is by someone who thinks software patents are a good thing and still contributes to open source software? How does this cognitive dissonance work out? Is he not aware that many open source licenses have exactly such terms in order to fight software patents? This isn't something new or outrageous.


I'm sorry, but how did you get that impression?

Here is a direct quote from the paper from which this blog post was made:

    Also, software should not be patentable.18 19 20 21 22
    The practice should be abolished immediately for the good
    of mankind and whomsoever disagrees with me on this owes
    me $1 billion in royalties because I patented the concept
    of being an asshole.
https://www.taoeffect.com/other/nupic/#conclusion

EDIT: Mirrors:

Paper: http://cdn.taoeffect.com/other/nupic/index.html#conclusion

Blog post: http://cdn.taoeffect.com/other/apache/index.html


Giving a perpetual royalty free license to anything you may ever patent for the rest of your life because of a subtle loophole in a license that people aren't generally aware of is, IMO, new and outrageous, irrespective of the utility (or lack thereof) of software patents.


A "subtle loophole in a license" is practically a contradiction in terms. Courts don't enforce unlikely interpretations that run counter to the reasonable (and documented!) expectations of most if not all parties concerned just because some lawyer walks into a courtroom and announces they want to interpret it that way. Law is not a programming language, and it's not enforced by computers.

If anything, the change that was made by the company here is even worse because it's obviously ambiguous. What exactly does it mean for a patent claim to "exist"? Are we talking about patents already granted? Patents filed? Patents that might be filed?


> many open source licenses have exactly such terms in order to fight software patents

This misses the point. If you want an atypically wide patent grant (covering not just patents infringed by your contributed code, but also to future contributions by other people which infringe a patent of yours), then that should be done openly and explicitly. Not by the backdoor with a clause that doesn't appear to do that but could be interpreted as doing do if you took it to its logical conclusion.

(Though it's pretty clear that doing do wasn't actually their intention, given their FAQ denies that interpretation - see DannyBee's post)


Use the MIT license.

The only thing the apache license gives over that is that derivative works include a notice acknowledging the previous authors.

Honestly, if I'm releasing my code for free, I couldn't care less. If you want to be a douche and pretend you wrote it, go for it.

It's like that quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson: The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

see: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/pick-a-license-any-...


The patent grant/license language of Apache 2.0 is actually quite important, especially for those downstream. That's why the FSF recommends[1] Apache over X11/MIT if you aren't going to go copyleft.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License


The article mentions the Apache ICLA (Individual Contribution License Agreement) and not the Apache License v2 as stated in the title.

For further information about the types of Apache license: https://www.apache.org/licenses/


Venturing just a little further than the title, into the first paragraph, we come across a (large, boldfaced) edited addition to the effect that "All of this applies to the regular Apache License (v2) as well".


Mirror (in case site is slow or goes down):

http://cdn.taoeffect.com/other/apache/index.html




Consider applying for YC's W25 batch! Applications are open till Nov 12.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: