FSDG-compatibility of APSL-2.0

[Philip McGrath]

Hi Guix,

Is the Apple Public Source License 2.0 (APSL-2.0 [1]) a free license 
according to Guix's standards?

In <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/55998>, I sent a patch adding a package 
under this license, and Maxime Devos pointed out this choice-of-forum 
provision, which I agree is quite one-sided:

> 13.6 Dispute Resolution. Any litigation or other dispute resolution
> between You and Apple relating to this License shall take place in the
> Northern District of California, and You and Apple hereby consent to
> the personal jurisdiction of, and venue in, the state and federal
> courts within that District with respect to this License. The
> application of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the
> International Sale of Goods is expressly excluded.

We thought this list was a better place for any discussion of Guix's 
policy that needs to happen.

As I understand it, Guix's current policy is the Free System 
Distribution Guidelines published at [2], which links to [3] for its 
definition of "free license". That definition says (at [4]), "It is 
acceptable for a free license to specify which jurisdiction's law 
applies, or where litigation must be done, or both."

The revision notes [5] say that paragraph was added in version 1.129, 
from 2012, but that "this was always our policy".

The FSF has issued an opinion [6] that APSL-2.0 is a free software 
license: they say that "Apple's lawyers worked with the FSF to produce a 
license that would qualify" (after problems with earlier versions of the 
license).

Is this satisfactory for Guix? Or does Guix want to forbid such 
choice-of-forum provisions? In the latter case `apsl2`, and maybe other 
definitions, presumable would need to be removed from `(guix licenses)`.

My personal view:

I wouldn't recommend using this license: indeed, even Apple seems to 
have moved away from it for newer projects (often to Apache-2.0). If 
established guidelines *hadn't* allowed this kind of one-sided 
choice-of-forum provision, I wouldn't have found it particularly 
surprising. I think there are important community governance questions 
around how questions like this ought to be answered (basically, I agree 
with [7]).

Still, I'm in favor of the status quo. I think fragmentation over 
license policies has a significant cost for the community, and this does 
not seem to be sufficiently problematic to be worth a schism.

I'm not a lawyer, so take this paragraph lease seriously, but I also 
think the concrete impact is less than it might first seem. We accept 
choice-of-forum provisions like the one in MPL-2.0 ("Any litigation 
relating to this License may be brought only in the courts of a 
jurisdiction where the defendant maintains its principal place of 
business and such litigation shall be governed by laws of that 
jurisdiction, without reference to its conflict-of-law provisions.") [8] 
which would require you to sue Apple in California. We also accept 
licenses like the GPL that don't have any choice-of-forum provisions: 
the law of "personal jurisdiction" and venue is complex, but I would not 
be shocked if Apple could sue you in California in this case. My 
impression is that it would be very difficult to require something like 
a "freedom not to litigate in California" (especially so for all 
possible values of "California") without rejecting many 
currently-accepted licenses.

-Philip

[1]: https://spdx.org/licenses/APSL-2.0.html
[2]: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
[3]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[4]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#legal-details
[5]: 
https://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/www/www/philosophy/free-sw.html?r1=1.128&r2=1.129
[6]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html
[7]: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-project/
[8]: https://spdx.org/licenses/MPL-2.0.html