| Re: [ee4j-community] Licensing considerations for EE4J implementation projects |
|
On 2018-01-23 2:10 PM, Mrinal Kanti
wrote:
My understanding is that if an ISV makes changes to the EE4J implementation projects for building, say, Product A, under EPLv2 to make them "cloud foundry ready" then they would have to ensure that Product A does not constitute a Derivative Work. Because if it does, then I understand from the reference cited below that the Product A would have to be released under EPLv2 license as well. This can further have a transitive impact on other downstream products which are indeed derivative works of Product A. In this scenario, I believe, usage of EPLv2 eliminated the option of releasing Product A (and possibly, other downstream products) to be released under Apache-2 license. No. That is incorrect. You seem to have a fundamental
misunderstanding of how the EPL works. First off, the copyleft provisions of the EPL-2.0 only apply if
the modifications are distributed. In the cloud scenario where
they are hosted on servers your company owns or rents, those
provisions don't apply. Secondly, the scope of the EPL-2.0 copyleft is restricted to the
source code that is being modified. If Product A is built on top
of the EPL-2.0-licensed software platform it can use any license
it wants, including Apache. This "building on top" scenario is by
far the most common one. The venerable Eclipse IDE ecosystem has
lots of plug-ins under the Apache license, for example. The only
source code you would need to make available under the EPL-2.0
would be changes to the existing EPL-2.0-licensed files which you
then distributed outside of your organization. This ensures that
your product doesn't ship a proprietary fork of the code that the
community has provided you. But to reiterate: you can
choose whatever license you want for your product code written
on top of the EE4J platform. Furthermore, the EPL
allows you to re-license the binaries and distribute the binaries
under any license (including proprietary) that conforms with the
requirements of section 3.1(b) of the EPL. Copyleft is a feature not a bug. The EPL-2.0 was constructed to
be the most commercially-friendly copyleft license available. |