Question

I read the original text of Apache License, Version 2.0 and the explanation in plain English.

OK, I copy a class distributed by The Best Company in the World, their license, and modify the code a bit.

The original file with my changes.

/*
 * Copyright (C) 2011 The Best Company in the World
 * 
 * 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.
 */

package com.mypackage;

public class MyClass {

    private void someMethod() {
        // Their code
        // My little change
    }
}

Then I use MyClass in my application.

  1. Do I need to replace The Best Company in the World with the name of my company or with my own name? If not, will my project contain two licenses: theirs and mine? Where to save them in this case?
  2. And as far as I understand, I must distribute my application using Apache Licence, Version 2.0.

Wikipedia says:

The Apache License is widely, but not universally, considered permissive in that it does not require a derivative work of the software, or modifications to the original, to be distributed using the same license (unlike copyleft licenses – see comparison).

Was it helpful?

Solution

Section 4 of the Apache License 2.0 is quite clear on what you must do when you distribute the changed file:

  • You must not remove the existing copyright claim (the one by 'the Best Company in the World')
  • You must make it clear the the file has been changed. The easiest way is to simply add your copyright after the original ones:

    Modifications copyright (C) 2013 <your company/name>
    

    If you did the modifications on behalf of your company, then that is in most cases also the name that you must put on the copyright notice

  • You may choose to use a different copyright license for your modifications. However, it is very uncommon for a single file to have multiple portions for which different copyright licenses apply and I doubt that the legal aspects of that have been tested in court, so I would advise against it.

If you don't distribute the modifications (or not outside your company), you don't have to do anything. Copyright licenses only come into play when distributing a program/library.

Licensed under: CC-BY-SA with attribution
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