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by shp0ngle
921 days ago
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You can legally say "this whole code is AGPLv3, based on works by these people under Apache". You cannot be legally obliged to say which parts are Apache and which parts are not. That makes no sense; that would make releasing the binaries and putting them under copyright illegal too as there is no source code. Someone can still come and cherry-pick the old Apache code, yes. But you (canonical in this case) don't have to say which parts are which, and as the project goes on and new work is added it will be pretty hard to do. That's basically what LibreOffice did with OpenOffice.org code... |
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No you can't literally make it the case that the code that used to be licensed as Apache is now licensed GPL. On the other hand you are free to convey that code under the terms of the GPL, without clearly specifying to others exactly which lines of code are Apache, except insofar as that license requires you to to do so. And you're free to create a combined work that the GPL (or another compatible license) applies to, and require a CLA for contributions to that combined work. In fact the Apache 2.0 license says you're free to "provide additional or different license terms ... for any such Derivative Works as a whole" (my emphasis).
But nobody ever thought you can "change the license" in that overly-literal sense, so far as I know. It's not what people who say "relicensing" mean in the software world, and the lawyers who talk as if we did completely miss the point.
> You cannot be legally obliged to say which parts are Apache and which parts are not.
This is not strictly accurate, in that you can't remove existing copyright statements from the source form of the work, under Apache 2.0:
> You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works
That would presumably include copyright statements placed on the original source files, if those exist. But you aren't obligated to do the work of explaining to others exactly which source lines have which copyright, as Apache does not obligate you to do so.