We need to make an election on which of the two patent licenses we wish to use for all future OSGi specifications.
The Eclipse IP Policy [1] offers two "Patent License" choices: "Implementation Patent License" or "Compatible Patent License". The distinction is (based upon my plain language reading of the choices) that the former grants to all "implementations" of a Final Specification while the latter only grants to "Compatible Implementations" of a Final Specification.
If we choose "Compatible Patent License", then the grants only occur _if_ the implementation passes the TCK (which is what a Compatible Implementation is: an implementation which passes the TCK).
If we choose "Implementation Patent License", then the grants occur without requiring passing the TCK.
"Implementation Patent License" is basically what we had in the past. But this was mostly because the TCK was not publicly available. The TCK was only available to OSGi members. Under the OSGi Working Group, the TCK will be open source and available to everyone. So having access to the TCK will not be an issue going forward.
The only issue with requiring the TCK passing is that the TCK may not properly run in select runtime environments. The current OSGi TCKs generally require a full Java runtime and may not run in some constrained/embedded Java runtimes. So if we require passing the TCK to gain the grants ("Compatible Patent License"), we may prevent some implementations from being able to get the grants due to technical limitations on being able to run the TCK in certain Java runtimes used/required by the implementation.
Given that we want OSGi to be fully usable in constrained/embedded Java runtimes and that there are technical limitations on running the TCK in all possible constrained/embedded Java runtimes, I would recommend we select the "Implementation Patent License" choice to provide the grants to all implementations.
--
BJ Hargrave
Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM // office: +1 386 848 1781
OSGi Fellow and OSGi Specification Project lead // mobile: +1 386 848 3788
hargrave@xxxxxxxxxx