<br><font size=3>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=1043&tag=nl.e589
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<br>
<br><font size=3>April 16th, 2009 </font>
<br><a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=1043"><font size=6>IBM
passes open source license baton to Eclipse</font></a>
<p><font size=3>Posted by Ed Burnette @ 12:47 pm</font>
<p><font size=3>IBM and the Eclipse Foundation have taken a stand against
license proliferation by announcing today that the </font><a href=http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cpl1.0.php><font size=3>Common
Public License</font></a><font size=3> (CPL) has been officially superseded
by the </font><a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/eclipse-1.0.php"><font size=3>Eclipse
Public License</font></a><font size=3> (EPL). The CPL will no longer be
considered an active open source license, but there’s an easy migration
path for CPL code to transition to EPL.</font>
<p><font size=3>Mike Milinkovich, executive director for life of the Eclipse
Foundation (just kidding Mike) </font><a href="http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/mike/2009/04/16/one-small-step-towards-reducing-license-proliferation/"><font size=3>broke
the news today</font></a><font size=3> in his blog. He writes:</font>
<p><font size=3>License proliferation in open source is a real issue. It
costs businesses to review multiple licenses, and the plethora of licenses
can be confusing to someone starting a new open source project.</font>
<p><font size=3>Over the past five years we have seen the Eclipse Foundation
go from a good idea that might work to one of the most successful open
source communities out there. We have seen the </font><a href=http://www.symbian.org/index.php><font size=3>Symbian
Foundation</font></a><font size=3> adopt the EPL </font><a href="http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1230416"><font size=3>as
its license</font></a><font size=3>, thereby bringing a huge community and
code base in its own right to the EPL, plus demonstrating the utility of
the license well outside of the Java domain that it is best known in. More
recently, Google also added the EPL as one of the licenses </font><a href="http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/08/mozilla-and-eclipse-licenses-now.html"><font size=3>it
supports on Google Code</font></a><font size=3>. It is clear that if we
wanted to consolidate on one license, that the EPL made the most sense.</font>
<p><font size=3>So what does this mean for projects such as </font><a href=http://mondrian.pentaho.org/><font size=3>Mondrian</font></a><font size=3>
which are distributed under the CPL? Well, nothing has to happen — you
can continue to use a dead license if you want. But because EPL has been
denoted as the formal “successor version of the CPL” you can use a provision
already in the CPL to switch. Section 7 says:</font>
<p><font size=3>In addition, after a new version of the Agreement is published,
Contributor may elect to distribute the Program (including its Contributions)
under the new version.</font>
<p><font size=3>EPL 1.0 is considered the “new version” of CPL 1.0 under
OSI rules.</font>
<p><font size=3>The two licenses were very close anyway. Other than their
names and (previously) their Agreement Stewards, the only real difference
was the way the patent license termination clause was written. That clause,
which has never been invoked as far as I know, covers what happens in the
event of a patent lawsuit. For more information on the relationship between
the CPL and the EPL see the </font><a href=http://www.eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php><font size=3>EPL
FAQ</font></a><font size=3>.</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif"><br>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
Robin Lougee-Heimer, PhD<br>
Program Manager, COIN-OR<br>
IBM TJ Watson Research Center<br>
1101 Kitchawan Road, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598<br>
ph: 914-945-3032 fax: 914-945-3434 <br>
robinlh@us.ibm.com<br>
http://www.coin-or.org<br>
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