Bruce
Perens, Primary Author: The Open Source Definition.
Co-Founder: The Open Source Initiative.
Wichert
Akkerman: Debian Project Leader.
Ian
Jackson: President, Software in the Public
Interest. Author, Debian package installation tool `dpkg’.
We welcome Apple Computer, Inc. as a participant in the Free
Software Community. We feel that a few problems in the present
version of the Apple Public Source
License (the APSL) disqualify it as “Open Source(TM)” or “Free
Software”. We hope that Apple can address these issues to
everyone’s satisfaction.
The participation of companies like Apple and IBM should be
considered in the same way as the participation of any free
software developer. Everyone is welcome to make a contribution.
Individually, we each decide whether or not to accept a particular
developer’s contribution, for reasons that range from technical to
legal and licensing concerns. We openly discuss these issues before
our community, often quite harshly, as a means of developing
consensus and charting our course. One consensus that we’ve reached
is the Open Source Definition, a generally accepted definition of
Free Software licensing, written by Bruce Perens and the Debian
GNU/Linux developers in 1997.
We note that much of the material that Apple has just released
under the APSL originated at The University of California, Berkeley
and at Carnegie-Mellon University. That work was sponsored by the
U.S. Government, paid for with our taxes, and was already available
as Free Software under the BSD license and other well-accepted Open
Source licenses. Many of these files do not significantly differ
from the pre-Apple versions except that they bear the addition of a
new copyright and license. Other files are entirely authored by
Apple or bear significant modifications that should indeed be
considered Apple’s property. Where Apple has not significantly
modified individual files from their pre-Apple versions, their
original licenses should be preserved without the addition of the
APSL.
Section 2.2(c) of the APSL requires that the producer of
modifications to APSL-licensed code use a particular URL in the
Apple.com domain to notify Apple. While the demise of Apple
Computer, Inc. is unlikely in the near future, that sad event would
leave us unable to comply with this section of the APSL. This would
constitute a restriction on all rights granted by the license,
including those rights necessary to qualify under the Open Source
Definition. The Free Software community plans a very long lifetime
for its software, and we hope that Apple will cooperate by changing
this provision so that APSL-licensed software could survive without
Apple. We suggest that the simple publication of modifications,
such as posting on a personal web site accessible to the global
internet and pointed out in any binary distributions, be all that
is required. This is consistent with other licenses in our
community.
Section 9.1 of the APSL allows Apple to terminate our rights to
use any or all APSL-covered code, at its sole discretion, in the
event of an unproven claim of infringement, no matter how specious.
This is derived from a similar objectionable portion of IBM’s
Jikes
license, which disqualified that license from being referred to
as “Open Source”. We hope that Apple will consider the investment
that members of the Free Software community will put into
APSL-licensed code when they write modifications for it. An
arbitrary termination could cause us to suddenly lose that
investment at some future date, with no chance for appeal. The
licenses accepted by our community do not provide the possibility
of termination in this manner. If termination due to an
infringement claim is to be allowed at all, it should be explicitly
limited to the particular source-code lines that are considered to
infringe upon an existing patent. This would make it possible for
the free software community to “write around the problem” and
create a non-infringing version. The authors of the APSL apparently
did not consider that patents expire. It should be possible for us
to store infringing code for restoral to use upon the expiration of
the patent in question. Apple might also consider if it’s possible
to allow third-parties to defend the disputed code from an
infringement claim that would cause us all to lose our rights under
the APSL.
We also regret to note that that Eric Raymond, with the best of
intentions, jumped a little too fast to embrace the APSL in his
enthusiasm to welcome Apple to our community. He placed the
Open Source designation on a license that wasn’t quite
ready for that. We invite Eric and other members of the Free
Software community to join us in requesting the few simple changes
to the APSL that we have outlined in this letter.