Project leaders for the widely used software chose to enter the fold of the Apache Software Foundation to take advantage of the nonprofit group's legal and technical resources. To make the move, SpamAssassin had to adopt the Apache License.
Previously, the software was available under a choice of two licenses: the General Public License (GPL) that governs Linux and many other open-source programs and the Perl Artistic License.
Open-source software advocates tout the fact that their programming philosophy permits large numbers of people to contribute to a project. But making the license change illustrated a difficulty of that broad collaboration: Project leaders had to secure the permission from all programmers who had contributed to SpamAssassin.
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