CPL

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Revision as of 16:12, 17 January 2011 by JaroslavTulach (Talk | contribs)
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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.

Contents

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?

CPL is Not Modern

OK, let's try to ask on a JUnit mailing list. Maybe the group would not mind upgrading to more modern license. At the end EPL is almost identical to CPL. So let's ask: 

Don't you want to relicense JUnit to some more commonly used license? EPL would
be fine. At least I have not heard any complain about EPL from our new lawyers
yet. Dual licensing to CPL & EPL probably too.

Asking on a mailing list of Open Source project can result into two options. Either complete silence. Or enormous amount of opinions. The JUnit community is however different. I've received quick answers with a bunch of opinions.

From that I have understood that Kent does not want to relicense, but rather offers commercial alternative license for companies scared of CPL.

CPL is Great!

TBD

CPL is Dead!

TBD

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