Licensing and your rights

Copyright reserves nearly everything by default, so a licence is what turns software from something you may only look at into something you may use. Apache-2.0 is a permissive licence: it grants permission generously and attaches few conditions.

In the terms the licence itself uses, it grants you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free and irrevocable copyright licence to use, reproduce, modify, display, sublicense and distribute the work. It also includes an express patent licence from contributors — a reason this licence was chosen for Foundation in preference to a shorter permissive licence that is silent on patents.

The conditions are practical rather than restrictive. If you redistribute the software, you must give recipients a copy of the licence, mark files you have changed, retain the copyright, patent, trademark and attribution notices you received, and carry across the attribution notices from any NOTICE file. There is no licence fee, no account, no renewal, and nothing to unsubscribe from.

Where the licence sits in relation to the rest of the arrangement is covered on the Ownership and portability page.

The licence was chosen for the platform, deliberately, and the reasons are practical rather than fashionable.

It is permissive, so adopting it does not infect what you build. A business may take Foundation, adapt it and build a commercial website on it, and its own site, content and configuration do not have to be published or licensed to anyone. A licence with a stronger reciprocity requirement would have been defensible, but it would have made the platform awkward to adopt for exactly the organisations it is aimed at.

It grants patents as well as copyright. Many short permissive licences say nothing about patents, which leaves a gap that a cautious reader has to notice and accept. Apache-2.0 includes an express patent licence from every contributor, together with a termination condition for anyone who sues over the software's patents. For a platform that others are expected to build businesses on, that is a meaningful difference rather than a detail.

It is widely used and well understood. Apache-2.0 is one of the most frequently adopted open-source licences in existence, so its terms, its obligations and its limits have been examined by adopters, lawyers and open-source programmes for years. Choosing a familiar licence lowers the cost of deciding whether the software is usable — you are not asking anyone to be the first to assess an unfamiliar text.

It is honest about its limits. The licence disclaims warranties, excludes trademark rights, and states that no contributor is obliged to provide support. Those clauses are not obstacles to adoption; they are the reason the terms can be relied upon by the project as well as by the adopter.

It keeps the platform open for everyone. Apache-2.0 does not transfer exclusive ownership to any adopter. Foundation remains available to the next business that needs it, which is the point of publishing a reusable base rather than selling copies of it.

One boundary is worth repeating, because it is easy to blur: the licence covers the platform's own code and documentation. It says nothing about your content, your branding or the work somebody does for you, and nothing about the Provelopment name or logos.

Most discussions of software licensing mention only copyright, and that is enough for most questions — but the two are separate rights, granted separately, and a licence can address one while remaining silent on the other.

Copyright protects the written form of a program. It is what makes copying, modifying and distributing the software an act that needs permission, and it is what the grant sections of a software licence are about. Every open-source licence deals with copyright; a licence cannot be open source without granting those permissions.

Patents protect inventions, which are a different kind of right: a patent can be infringed by an implementation that was written from scratch, without any copying at all. A software project can therefore be perfectly clear about copyright and still leave an adopter exposed to a patent claim — either from a contributor to the project, or from a third party. Apache-2.0 addresses the first of those two positions: contributors grant a patent licence for their contributions, and if someone initiates patent litigation alleging that the software infringes, the patent permissions they received under this licence end.

It does not address the second. No open-source licence can grant you rights in patents held by strangers, and no licence can promise that no such patent exists. What Apache-2.0 does is remove a known, avoidable gap in what the project's own contributors grant — which is precisely why it was preferred here over a shorter permissive licence that omits the subject.

For a business, the practical reading is short. You get a broad copyright licence and an express patent grant from the people who wrote the code. You do not get a warranty, an indemnity, an assurance that no third party holds a relevant patent, or any rights in the project's name and marks.