Re: [epl-discuss] GPL compatibility for EPL v2

[Luis Villa <luis@xxxxx>]

Hi, Mike-

I agree that it would be excellent, and I think (given the differences in the pre-existing community "defaults") that having it off by default would make perfectly good sense for Eclipse.

For what it is worth, I suspect that GPL 2 v. GPL 3 are either equally impossible or equally possible, depending on whether you choose an explicit compatibility/relicensing clause (as we did in MPL, which can handle both v2 and v3) or you rely on implicit compatibility (as you've historically done with EDL, which I think would likely be equally impossible for either v2 or v3).

If it would help, I'm happy to have a call with you/your team to discuss the history of that clause in MPL - it ... isn't the most straightforward thing I've ever drafted ;)

Luis

On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 10:11 AM Jay Jay Billings <jayjaybillings@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think this would be excellent, although I admit that I'm not a legal eagle.

Jay

On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 5:03 PM, Mike Milinkovich <mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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

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Jay Jay Billings

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Twitter Handle: @jayjaybillings

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