[JPivot-devel] Re: Licensing

[Sherman W. <sg...@ix...>]

The detailed "change the license" discussion has not been through this list,
though it has come up now and again, and there have probably been a number
of offline conversations. A few thoughts:

- Changing the license at this point will require the agreement of all
current contributors to Mondrian, which is going to be difficult given the
number of them and the changing people involved. For example, who speaks for
Kana and Alphablox now?

- There are a number of firms that are using Mondrian today in their
offerings, so the CPL must not be that onerous.

- I am not a patent lawyer by any stretch, but I can see how the patent
related language in the CPL would be an issue with a firm like SAS, where
they potentially have multiple products with a customer. The "viral" nature
of the CPL related to patents is untested legally, like the vast majority of
open source licenses.

- I had no idea how multi-way licenses would work. The explanation of the
MPL's policy (relicensing link below) was good.

- Anything we talk about or agree on for Mondrian does not mean that JPivot
will do the same thing. That is a discussion with a different community,
with Tonbeller being the major party

- Have you got examples of how the "change the license without agreement by
all copyright holders" works in practice in a real open source project?
Personally, I like the fact that the license can only be changed with
agreement from all contributors.

- Ed. what is your specific proposal? You stated options and issues, not
something concrete.


Having gone through this thinking, I see no burning need to change the
license.


Sherman

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ed Burnette" <Ed....@sa...>
To: <mon...@li...>
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 6:20 AM
Subject: Licensing [was: RE: [Mondrian-devel] Mondrian - Next Version]



Regardless, I'd really like to see the license problems fixed so both
Mondrian and JPivot can be used more widely. This has been unresolved for a
long time, and there has been all kind of discussions, but nothing has
changed. The fact is that CPL has some language about patents that our
lawyers are not comfortable with. Granted, we have very picky lawyers but I
imagine we're not the only ones.

Instead of trying to pick one license (which doesn't seem to be working),
how about a multi-way license, such as CPL/EPL. Or you could go further to
encompass other comunities with CPL/EPL/LGPL, or even
CPL/EPL/MPL/CDDL/GPL/LGPL.

Like CPL/EPL, MPL requires reciprocity (giving back fixes) but has the same
patent problems as CPL. CDDL looks to be in the same spirit as EPL though I
haven't gotten any official legal advice on it. GPL of course is no good for
commercial software but there is a lot of free GPL code out there which may
want to integrate with Mondrian/Jpivot (or vice-versa). See
http://www.opensource.org for the license texts.

To help eliminate this problem in the future, contribution of code should be
contingent on giving permission to relicense, like what Mozilla requires
(see http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html). It seems likely other
licenses will be coming out in the future that are compatible with the
spirit of the Mondrian/Jpivot philosophy  of allowing use in closed source
projects but requiring all fixes, modifications, and improvements to be
given back to the community under the same license as the original. The
project leaders need the flexibility to adapt to the changing license
landscape without having to get written permission from 100 people every
time.