> the ASF will always provide all of it's released software under a similar style permissive license to Apache-2.0, as long as the organization is around.
What makes you think that? What stops a few "evil" people from getting on the board and changing the mission in some way and then changing the license so that it is no longer permissive?
I've never been clear on what stops the above attack. Many people have setup foundations on their death that are now promoting things the person was clearly against in their life. Martin Luther King Jr's "I have a dream" speech is now property of his heirs who milk that copyright for all the dollars they can get - I believe this is not what he would have wanted. There are plenty of other examples.
Personally I know it since I've been volunteering there since 1999 and know how elections work and know most of the membership. But that probably doesn't help much if you don't know me.
Practically, I know it because the ASF is a Membership organization, meaning there are hundreds of individual Members who have been elected by their peers inside the ASF. The Membership is the group who elects the board. The ASF has only individuals as Members (never corporations), and quite a lot of folks have made their careers about their ASF project work, while hopping between multiple jobs at various vendors.
So to mount an attack like that, you'd need to "evil-ise" a over a hundred Members to get them to vote for your hand-picked candidates who would be shunned by basically everyone else involved in the ASF.
Vendor neutrality and our permissive license are baked very, very deeply into everything the ASF does.
A fair number of 501(c)(3) foundations are similarly membership corporations, where the board is elected from the set of people who've been volunteering there for years, so they are unlikely to change direction like that. Some (c)(3)s are not, but still have a good track history. (c)(6) organizations are a mixed bag, since some explicitly allow sponsors to pay for board seats - a very different world.
What makes you think that? What stops a few "evil" people from getting on the board and changing the mission in some way and then changing the license so that it is no longer permissive?
I've never been clear on what stops the above attack. Many people have setup foundations on their death that are now promoting things the person was clearly against in their life. Martin Luther King Jr's "I have a dream" speech is now property of his heirs who milk that copyright for all the dollars they can get - I believe this is not what he would have wanted. There are plenty of other examples.