Maintaining copyright and license notices is complicated, and not
everyone who should do it does it, or does it correctly.
I don't know what happened in this particular case, but my guess is
that it was something like this...
We have some tools that maintain and update copyright notices in source
files. Most of these tools are pretty stupid. They don't know what the
license *should* be. They just apply or change the license as they're
told. All too often people fail to include a copyright/license header
when creating a new file. Periodically we notice this situation and try
to correct it. Most likely, someone applied these tools to the entire
source base to make sure every file had a copyright/license, not realizing
that some of the files should have a different license.
Some time ago it was reported to us that this had happened to some files
that originally had an Apache license, and that we should not have
removed the Apache license notice when we relicensed the files under
our license. In discussions with people at Apache, we reached an
agreement for how the license notices in such files should be handled.
We updated the files we knew about to include this combined license
notice.
As to whether these files should have a Sun (or Oracle) copyright notice
and license, or should retain only the original Apache copyright notice
and license, that's a question for lawyers, and not one that can be
answered in this forum.
Note also that many of the files originally contributed to various Apache
projects were contributed by Sun. I believe Sun retained the copyright
on the original versions of these files. Doing the archeology on a
file by file basis to determine which copyrights are valid can be very
complicated and expensive.
D M German wrote on 06/21/10 07:05 PM:
>
> Hi everybody,
>
> I am a software engineering researcher at the University of Victoria, in
> Canada. I am part of group of researchers who are trying to understand
> the way that free and open source software is reused, particularly with
> an emphasis on how the license of the software plays a role in such
> reuse.
>
> In our analysis we have noticed that Glassfish has included copies of
> some Apache code in its own source tree. We have tracked the evolution
> of some of those files. See diagram attached, also available at
>
> http://turingmachine.org/~dmg/temp/XMLChar-glassfish.gif
>
> which shows one of such files:
>
> src/java/org/apache/jasper/xmlparser/XMLChar.java
>
> These files are particularly interesting to us because they have
> suffered changes in their license.
>
> This is the blame of that file, according to glassfish CVS browser:
>
> https://glassfish.dev.java.net/source/browse/glassfish/appserv-webtier/src/java/org/apache/jasper/xmlparser/XMLChar.java?rev=1.3&view=markup
>
> As you can see in the diagram, the original license of the file at the
> time it was copied into the Glassfish tree was Apache version 2
> (revision 1.1 of the file in glassfish), at which point the following
> was added to the file, (before the original license statement of the
> file that states that the copyright is own by Apache):
>
> Copyright 2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
> SUN PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL. Use is subject to license terms.
>
> The Glassfish team later modified the license of the file to CDDL v1.0
> (from Apache 2.0, at revision 1.2 of the file), and then to a dual
> license CDDL + GPL v2 (revision 1.3).
>
> It seems that the licensing statement of each file was probably changed
> during a massive replace of all the files of the system. Furthermore,
> the copyright ownership of the files was also changed significantly. As
> you can see, even though the source code of the latest version of the
> file is identical to revision 1.1, its header has been modified to
> include:
>
> ...
> DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS HEADER.
>
> Copyright 1997-2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
>
> Portions Copyright Apache Software Foundation.
> ...
>
> Given that Sun is not the copyright owner of these files, shouldn't
> Glassfish revert the copyright of such files to the Apache Foundation,
> in the form:
>
> DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS HEADER.
>
> Copyright 1999,2004 Apache Software Foundation
>
> Portions Copyright Sun Microsystems
>
> Any help to understand this evolution will be greatly appreciated.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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