Re: [Springframework-developer] Open source licensing questions

[Juergen H. <jue...@in...>]

It seems that this hasn't been answered before, so I'll have a go...
 
1. We never accept contributions without asking questions. It's rather that
we're famous for tearing everything apart and reimplementing it in the
smoothest fashion that we can think of :-) In general, we don't do explicit
searches for similar existing code, but on the other hand, we hardly ever
get large contributions in the first place. We implement almost everything
ourselves, based on *feature suggestions* that we receive.
 
2. We do not require a formal contributor's statement at present, other than
what's stated in the Apache 2.0 license. While we have considered a formal
statement repeatedly, there was no strong need to move forward with this.
Note that 99% of Spring's codebase is written by no more than 5 people, with
all further contributors working closely with those core developers. As a
consequence, we exercise strong control and diligence nevertheless.
 
3. Spring was founded as an open source project in February 2003, with
public releases being available since June 2003 (1.0 final was released in
March 2004). We originally used the Apache 1.1 license, but switched to the
Apache 2.0 license for the Spring 1.0 final release already.
 
4. Spring's main download site is SourceForge. Beyond that, BEA offer a full
Spring distribution download for the current 'officially supported' version
from their own website. Of course, a couple of other open source projects
include Spring jars in their distribution, as you would expect.
 
Regards,
 
Juergen
 


  _____  

From: spr...@li...
[mailto:spr...@li...] On Behalf
Of Lee, Pak Hung
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 4:26 PM
To: spr...@li...
Subject: Re: [Springframework-developer] Open source licensing questions



Sorry for the typos.  I am actually talking about Spring rather than
JasperReport.

 

  _____  

From: Lee, Pak Hung 
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 11:17 PM
To: 'spr...@li...'
Subject: Open source licensing questions

 

Dear developers,

 

I am not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I am currently working
on a project in Hong Kong that use JasperReport for reporting and the client
need some clarification from us before approving the use of open source
software like Spring in the project.  

 

Following are the questions that I received and cannot find the answer on
the net:

 

1. Does the maintainer perform any review of contributions (other than a
technical review) to understand whether he has the right to redistribute the
code or does the maintainer accept contributions without asking questions?

 

2. Specifically, does the maintainer require contributors to accept/sign any
kind of contributor's statement?  If yes, could you provide a copy to me

 

3. How long has this package been available?  Has the license changed over
time?  

 

4. Has this code been distributed by others?  If yes, who and how so?

 

This is critical to our project and would appreciate if you can help.

 

Thanks and regards,

P.H. Lee



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