"9. Accepting Warranty or Additional Liability. While redistributing the Work or Derivative Works thereof, You may choose to offer, and charge a fee for, acceptance of support, warranty, indemnity, or other liability obligations and/or rights consistent with this License. However, in accepting such obligations, You may act only on Your own behalf and on Your sole responsibility, not on behalf of any other Contributor, and only if You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold each Contributor harmless for any liability incurred by, or claims asserted against, such Contributor by reason of your accepting any such warranty or additional liability."
So someone please help explain how this is possible:
From Reuters Nov 9, 2011:
"Google Inc will continue to offer support to firms using its Android system that are involved in legal disputes, its executive chairman Eric Schmidt said on Wednesday, as the Internet giant looks to cement alliances in the face of toughening competition."
The way I am reading the Apache license says that Google should not be giving support to OEMs? Am I reading this part wrong? "However, in accepting such obligations, You may act only on Your own behalf and on Your sole responsibility, not on behalf of any other Contributor" I'm not the best at reading law, so I would love some insight.
First off, you are reading it wrong. But it doesn't matter.
Google owns the copyright on Android, so the Apache License has no relevance to their activities. Licenses are a way of limiting the restrictions levied by copyright law; they give you more freedom than you would otherwise have. If you otherwise have more freedom than a license grants because you are not bound by copyright law, you ignore the license. It's meaningless.
I haven't contributed any code to the Apache-licensed parts of Android, but I assume that you assign copyright to Google when you push your code. That means that Google continues to own the copyright on the whole codebase, and you have copyright on your contributions.
The license says Google is not obligated to offer support, accept liability, etc. to anyone who uses the code. Google is, of course, free to do more than that for certain users (like Android OEMs) if they want to.
From: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html
"9. Accepting Warranty or Additional Liability. While redistributing the Work or Derivative Works thereof, You may choose to offer, and charge a fee for, acceptance of support, warranty, indemnity, or other liability obligations and/or rights consistent with this License. However, in accepting such obligations, You may act only on Your own behalf and on Your sole responsibility, not on behalf of any other Contributor, and only if You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold each Contributor harmless for any liability incurred by, or claims asserted against, such Contributor by reason of your accepting any such warranty or additional liability."
So someone please help explain how this is possible:
From Reuters Nov 9, 2011:
"Google Inc will continue to offer support to firms using its Android system that are involved in legal disputes, its executive chairman Eric Schmidt said on Wednesday, as the Internet giant looks to cement alliances in the face of toughening competition."
The way I am reading the Apache license says that Google should not be giving support to OEMs? Am I reading this part wrong? "However, in accepting such obligations, You may act only on Your own behalf and on Your sole responsibility, not on behalf of any other Contributor" I'm not the best at reading law, so I would love some insight.
Edit to add Reuters link: http://us.mobile.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE7...