ASL 2.0 based software contribution to FreeBSD code base

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 11 Mar 2009, Saifi Khan wrote:

> Is Apache Software License (ASL) 2.0 based software contributions accepted 
> in FreeBSD code base ?
>
> Specific case to consider would be:
> a. device driver code released under ASL 2.0
>
> b. code contributed to kernel (eg. scheduler implementation)
>    under ASL 2.0
>
> c. code contributed to userland (eg. new implementation of
>   ctags) under ASL 2.0
>
> Can some of the experienced members share how things work
> within the context of FreeBSD project ?

Four points, really:

(0) One of the important goals of the FreeBSD Project is to produce a
     BSD-licensed operating system.

(1) The FreeBSD Project is concerned about the level of license proliferation
     in the tree, and would like to avoid adding new licenses where it can
     possibly be avoided.  There has been some recent effort to consolidate
     under the simplified (two-clause) BSD license for this reason, but
     tracking down all license holders on more-clause licenses is non-trivial.
     We are no longer accepting new code with the advertising clause in the
     general case, and we are not aware of any major producers of code still
     using that clause.  The advent of licenses such as GPLv3 and CDDL has cost
     the project real developer time and real money to resolve, and that's
     really rather a waste.

(2) Licenses such as ASL, APSL, and CDDL are significantly more complicated
     than most existing licenses in the tree, and as such risk being in
     conflict with each other.  For example, can you combine code under
     arbitrary combinations of two or three of these licenses?  Lawyers have to
     get involved to answer questions of these sorts.  We would like not to
     invoke (expensive) lawyers frequently or at all.

(3) In general, base kernel components to be included in the GENERIC kernel
     cannot be under non-BSD/MIT/ISC licenses.  We do have non-BSD licensed
     code in the base tree, but generally under "exceptional" circumstances --
     a truly compelling technical need (we require a compiler, but there are
     currently only GPL compilers in open source, so we have one).  There is a
     concerted ongoing effort to remove or replace non-BSD licensed components
     in the system with BSD-licensed ones.

The only recent exceptions in this arena have been CDDL code from OpenSolaris 
-- ZFS and DTrace, and with DTrace there was a significant delay in importing 
the code while we worked through license issues and made sure that the GENERIC 
kernel did not include any CDDL code.  Several of our large corporate 
consumers have policies that CDDL code does not ship in their products and so 
we also have careful source tree separation.

So in short: we would heavily discourage code being submitted under non-BSD 
licenses on the basis that our goal is to produce a BSD-licensed system, 
license proliferation has real-world overhead especially in terms of 
constrained developer and lawyer time, makes it harder for FreeBSD end-users 
to understand their rights and whether or not they can combine components, and 
when other licenses are used they require very special handling.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge