guidelines for using apache code

Benjamin Kosnik bkoz@redhat.com
Wed May 25 22:57:00 GMT 2005


I'm not going to comment on the particulars of this issue, but Paolo
has requested some clarification and so...

> This in an important point, as long as code is supposed to be useful
> *for developers* of the library, not for *users* only (*). I would
> appreciate clarifications, not only limited to Apache, of course,
> because the issue is much more general. In my understanding, what we
> *can* definitely do without any problem is using external GPL (with
> exceptions) code for v3. Traditionally I stay away from anything
> different than GPL, to be safe, but, *maybe* other free licenses (I
> think an important superset of GPL is that of free licenses) are also
> compatible from this point of view. We (I) should study in detail some
> of this, at least:
> 
>     http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

In general FSF copyright, GPL with exceptions license is what we want. 

Per your link above, the Apache 2.0 License is GPL incompatible. Thus,
the libstdc++ project cannot use items under this license. If you are
interested in using items licensed this way, you'd need to try and get
the copyright holder to re-license for your use in libstdc++.

It is my understanding that some future Apache license may be GPL compatible. So, there is hope.

So, to be clear: don't use Apache 2.0 License code in libstdc++. Period.

I've already clarified using boost code in a previous message.

Using X11 licensed code is easy, see what we did with the SGI STL code.

Hope this helps!

-benjamin






More information about the Libstdc++ mailing list