Design Doc: Apache Relicensing

SiteMesh 2 is licensed under the OpenSymphony Software License v1.1.
This is similar to the Apache Software License v1.1 with references to Apache changed to OpenSymphony.

SiteMesh 3 will be relicensed under the Apache Software License v2.0 license.

Reasons:

• Apache Software License v2.0 is a widely accepted license by many organizations, that simplifies usage. The OpenSymphony Software License was relatively unknown.
• Apache Software License v2.0 is decoupled from the Apache Software Foundation and does not need to be modified to support OpenSymphony/SiteMesh.
• More benefits…

Contributor approval

The majority of SiteMesh 3 has been written from scratch under the Apache Software License v2.0 by Joe Walnes and the SiteMesh 3 contributors.

However, some parts of the code were forked from SiteMesh 2, which was licensed under the OpenSymphony Software License v1.1. In this case, consent to relicense under Apache Software License v2.0 has been sought from all that contributed to these parts of the code

• Joe Walnes: Approved
• Scott Farquar: Approved
• Mathias Bogaert: Approved
• Hani Suleiman: Approved
• Mike Cannon-Brookes: Approved
• Rickard Oberg: Approved

There were many other contributions to the SiteMesh 2 project, but these have not made it to SiteMesh 3.

License header

As described on the Apache website, the following header shall be applied
to all Java source files (change year as appropriate):

/* Copyright 2009 SiteMesh Team
 *
 * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. 
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License. */

Status

• All contributors have approved the change.
• License header not applied to all files yet.