[openstack-dev] [all] "All rights reserved" V.S. "Apache license"

Stefano Maffulli stefano at openstack.org
Sun Jan 18 22:53:06 UTC 2015


On Sat, 2015-01-17 at 16:07 -0500, Monty Taylor wrote:
> It's actually a set of words that is no longer necessary as of the year
> 2000. It's not communicating anything about a granted license, which is
> what the Apache License does - it's actually just asserting that the
> original copyright holder asserts that they have not waived any of their
> rights as a copyright holder. However, the Berne convention grants this
> automatically without a positive assertion.

I think ZhiQiang Fan's question is about the sentence "all rights
reserved" followed by the implicit "some rights not reserved" granted by
the Apache license, rather than the meaning of 'all rights reserved'
alone. You're right that such sentence by itself is meaningless but in
the context of the Apache license I think it's confusing at best,
probably wrong.

I don't remember seeing this case discussed on legal-discuss and I'm
quite sure that the right way to apply the Apache license to source code
is *not* by saying "(C) `date +%Y` Foo Corp, All Rights Reserved"
followed by Apache license (see appendix on
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)

Maybe a passage on legal-discuss would be better?

/stef




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