[epl-discuss] GPL compatibility for EPL v2

[Mike Milinkovich <mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

All,

Jay's question reminded me that I have been wanting to start another 
discussion thread on GPL compatibility for some time.

At Eclipse we have quite a few projects which are dual-licensed EPLv1 
and BSD. For those who are not familiar with it, Eclipse has its own 
version of the 3-clause BSD license called the Eclipse Distribution 
License (EDL).
https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/edl-v10.php

Although there a variety of reasons why projects select the EPL+EDL 
combination, by far the most common reason given is that the project 
requires some way to be GPL compatible. We see this quite a bit in the 
IoT space for example.

The downside to having a project EPL+EDL-licensed is that we lose the 
copyleft provisions which provide helpful community-building attributes.

My proposal would be that we look at what it would take to make the 
EPLv2 optionally GPL-compatible. By "optional" what I mean is that we 
would do the opposite of the approach taken by the MPL 2.0, where code 
is GPL-compatible by default, and which could be over-ridden by a notice 
file. I would propose that by default the EPLv2 is *not* GPL-compatible, 
but the Initial Contributor for a project could add a notice file adding 
in the necessary terms to be GPL-compatible. This would provide projects 
with the ability to be GPL-compatible without adding a permissive 
license to the mix.

For this to be worthwhile, I think we would need to be able to provide 
compatibility with both GPL 2.1 and GPL 3.0.

So esteemed readers: what do you think? Is this a good or bad idea? Is 
it even possible? I understand that GPL 2.1 compatibility can be more 
difficult (if not impossible) to accomplish.


--
Mike Milinkovich
mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxx
+1.613.220.3223 (mobile)
@mmilinkov