Background

Prior to the software grant to ASF on Sept 15, 2015 as an incubating project, MADlib was an open-source library licensed under a 2-clause BSD license, with multiple contributors since its inception in approximately 2011. After the grant to ASF, the MADlib community requested guidance from ASF legal regarding how to manage license headers for legacy BSD-licensed files, modified BSD-licensed files, and new files.  The intent of the request was to ensure that the Apache MADlib (incubating) project was acting as a "good Apache citizen" and respecting the guidelines of ASF with respect to software licensing.

Guidance

From project mentor Roman Shaposhnik on 2/27/2017 we heard the ultimate resolution on the IP issue.  See the associated thread on the MADlib mailing list but the summary is:

  • don't do anything with existing (BSD) files even if we edit them
  • every new file we create gets an ASF license header
  • see the associated ASF legal thread (LEGAL-293) leading to this guidance

This guidance was implemented in full in the MADlib 1.10 release.  Prior to this ruling, Apache MADlib releases largely adhered to this as well with possibly a few minor exceptions.

Artifacts

Attached to this web page are the following artifacts related to adherence to the ASF licensing guidelines:

  • files_w_apache_header.txt - files in the MADlib 1.10 RC-1 release candidate that had ASF license headers
  • new_files_after_apache.txt. - new files created after the 9/15/2015 grant to ASF
  • license_header_reconciliation.xls - shows how the above two lists were reconciled to produce MADlib 1.10 RC-2 release candidate which fully adheres to ASF licensing guidelines

 

Third Party Components

Here is some other licensing related info that may be of interest:

 

 

 

 

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