Re: [epl-discuss] Next Round of Proposed Revisions to the EPL

[Michael Dolan <mdolan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

No, the inclusion of "documentation source" was intentional. It is there largely to be consistent with EPL 1.0, which defines Contribution as:

"Contribution" means:
          a) in the case of the initial Contributor, the initial code and *documentation* distributed under this Agreement....

Yes, I had noticed the change to "documentation source" (draft) vs "documentation" (in v1.0) and wondered if the scope intention changed. I specifically wondered if you were limiting the scope to documentation comments included in the source code.

So historically, at least, the EPL has always been intended to cover both the code and the related documentation.

Does that answer your question?

It does and the intention for consistency with 1.0 makes sense. 

One side note is that with the Apache 2 license projects, we had to field questions a few times along the lines of "if I contribute documentation that implements functionality I have a related patent on, am I bound to the Apache 2 patent grant even though it's just documentation and not code."  I'm not sure if you get similar questions regarding the EPL 1.0, but I've run into it more often than I'd have expected prior to joining the LF.