CPL
From APIDesign
Common Public License is an open source software license originally used by Eclipse later superceeded by EPL.
Most of the software projects already migrated from CPL to EPL, but one important project has not done that yet (as of January 2011): JUnit. This essay describe my experience when trying to convince my company lawyers to like CPL, so NetBeans can redistribute JUnit without problems.
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CPL is Unacceptable
We have new lawyers. The old Sun lawyers are gone and as we are getting more and more integrated into Oracle, we need to align with its culture. One of such cultural checks is to re-approve all the open source licenses used by NetBeans.
Our new lawyers seem to be concerned about CPL, the JUnit license. True, JUnit's use of Common Public License is unique and sort of archaic. I don't know about any other (important) project using this license anymore. But the CPL was found OK by Sun lawyers and we've been shipping JUnit for ten years! What can be so horrible with it that now it is a problem?
Why we are are holding the NetBeans release and getting ready to remove JUnit from our standard installation? Is not that silly? JUnit is necessary part of any serious Java development. What can we do to allow JUnit and NetBeans to cooperate?
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