The Common Development and Distribution License [LWN.net]

The Common Development and Distribution License

Posted Dec 9, 2004 10:02 UTC (Thu) by james (subscriber, #1325)
In reply to: The Common Development and Distribution License by mfrancis
Parent article: The Common Development and Distribution License

...end user licenses (excluding distributors and resellers)...

So if you're an end-user, you're fine.

But it explicitly excludes distributors and resellers, with the implication that their licenses will be revoked.

Section 6.1 is "if you fail to comply with the terms" and 6.2 is "don't sue us for patents".

So if, hypothetically, Sun's good friend Microsoft were to make a CDDL-licensed Solaris Media Player, based on XML code that Sun had licensed, there would be nothing to stop Red Hat or SUSE including it in their distributions.

But then if Sun and Microsoft fell out again (as seems plausible) and Microsoft sued Sun for patent infringement over XML...

Sun would be the Initial Developer, Microsoft would be the party whose license rights were revoked. Red Hat's and SUSE's end-users would be protected by the above clause, but Red Hat and SUSE, as distributors and resellers, might not be.

James.

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Chain license termination

Posted Dec 10, 2004 1:32 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

it explicitly excludes distributors and resellers, with the implication that their licenses will be revoked.

But such implications have no legal impact, so I wonder if there's something else in the license that says all downstream licenses are conditional on the behavior of the distributor.