This page includes a concatenation of the reports made by the VP of Legal Affairs to the ASF Board of Directors, and may be of interest to committers wishing to follow the progress and history of legal policy issues.
The following reports are included in this page:
LICENSING HEADER: I sent a summary of the resolution passed
at last month's meeting to the legal-discuss list and
am compiling a short FAQ based on questions from that
thread. The summary and FAQ will be linked from a new
apache.org/legal/ home page by the end of the week, and
send a notification of the posting to committers@. I
originally stated that the new header would need to be
implemented on releases on or after August 1, 2006,
but will push that date back one month, since I was slow
to get this out to all committers.
PATENT LICENSING IN CCLAS: There continues to be some degree
of controversy over my statement on how the CCLA patent
license should be interpreted. I continue to state
that the patents are licensed for both the contribution
and combinations of the contribution with the continuing
evolution of the project. In other words, the ASF is
not interested in contributions with strings attached
(strings = restrictions on what it can be combined with).
SFLC LETTER ON ODF: The SFLC has asked us to review a draft
statement on the legal encumbrances of the OASIS ODF
specification. If we agree with the draft, they would
like to issue a statement that they are representing the
positions on two of their clients, the ASF and FSF.