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After the receipt of the letter from JBoss's lawyers regarding alleged IP infringment in the Geronimo codebase (and thus non-compliance with (L)GPL, the Incubator team and the Geronimo development team performed an exhaustive review of not only the specific claims, but also the general claim. The end result of the review is that there is no basis for their claim. Therefore the Incubator and Geronimo PPMC ask that Board to review the following as a draft response and, upon approval, forward this to the ASF lawyers for review and comment. Draft Response as Attachment M. By Unanimous Consent, the Board approved the measure to forward the draft response, for review and comments, to our lawyer.
Dear Gentlemen : We thank your for your letter of October 31, 2003 informing us of your client's concern that JBoss code has been copied into the Geronimo project. As we take all intellectual property infringement concerns very seriously, we have carefully reviewed each Exhibit and other claims, and conclude that there is no validity to the claims in the letter. This review was undertaken publicly by the ASF and all discussion and results are available via any archive of the Geronimo development list. For your convenience, you may find an archive of the messages at this URL: http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/SummarizeList?listName=geronimo-dev@incubator.apache.org. The summary of the findings is available in our CVS and accessible at this URL : http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/incubator-geronimo/docs_nopublish/JBoss_20031031.html In brief : o Exhibit A's claim of a "high degree of similarity" between the two named files is due to the fact that both files are derived from the same code from and ASF-licensed Apache codebase, the Apache Logging (was Apache Jakarta Log4j) project. We would like to politely request that the JBoss Group LLC review their derived version of the code to be sure all requirements of the Apache Software License have been followed. o Exhibit B's claim of similarity due to the the same reason. Both were derived or based on the same code from the ASF-licensed Apache codebase, the Apache Logging project. o Exhibit C claim of similarity have been researched in both the Geronimo as well as the JBoss codebases, and we find that the similarity is due to the same author licensing code to JBoss under the LGPL and Geronimo under the ASL. Such dual licensing of code is legitimate as the author is only granting a license when contributing code, not transferring all further rights. We also verified that changes made by JBoss to the LGPL-ed version were not brought to Geronimo. o There is an additional claim regarding the Invocation class. We do not believe that this is an example of infringement for reasons listed in the summary of findings. As an organization dedicated to open source software development, we are continuously working to ensure that the code that we provide through our many projects is free of IP encumbrance or questions of provenance. We appreciate you bringing the concerns of the JBoss Group LLC to our attention, and believe that our review has shown them to be unfounded. We will continue to monitor Geronimo as we do all of our projects to ensure quality of the code contained therein. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions about this matter, or any further concerns your client may have. Very truly yours, Greg, Dirk and Jim