LWN: Comments on "The Common Development and Distribution License"

The Common Development and Distribution License

garloff — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 18:38:24 +0000

Indeed, it does mean the opposite.

And if you look at the reasoning why the Munich court held the GPL
valid, you'll understand why this clause was put there.

Chain license termination

giraffedata — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 01:32:24 +0000

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.

The Common Development and Distribution License

JoeBuck — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 18:31:16 +0000

The differences really don't matter much in practice. Sun's license allows modifications only if the modified license has a new name and no references to Sun (other than a notice that the new licence differs from the CDDL). The GPL text itself can't be changed, but a derived license can be created by including the GPL file in a distribution, and then saying that the license that applies to the work is the GPL together with a set of modifications. It seems that language like Sun's is the minimum necessary to prevent fraud; if a license text can be modified without restriction, this could be used to fool people into accepting terms they disagree with (just insert a strategic "not" somewhere).

The only sense in which the difference matters is that if the GPL is altered in this way, the original text of the GPL has to be included in full, which offends some people who don't like the condemnation of proprietary software in the GPL's preamble.

The Common Development and Distribution License

iabervon — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 17:15:23 +0000

That seems to me to refer to making a new license which includes samples from the GPL, not taking the GPL document and clarifying your interpretations of the terms. Also, I can't see any reason to believe the GPL FAQ's idea of what you can do with the terms, aside from the fact that the FAQ is a written document from the owner of the GPL document, so it would probably be considered permission for anything it permits, even if those things wouldn't be permitted otherwise. The GPL document itself states: "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed."

Of course, copyright not being patents, you can certainly reverse-engineer the GPL and produce a free equivalent.

The Common Development and Distribution License

james — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 10:02:54 +0000

...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.

The Common Development and Distribution License

mfrancis — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 09:36:02 +0000

> > 6.4. In the event of termination under Sections 6.1 or 6.2 above, all end user licenses [...] shall survive termination.

Surely this means the opposite of

> So if you are a software distributor, and you got the code from somebody who later turns around and sues Sun, you can lose your rights to the software under the license.

And in fact Sun are guaranteeing that this will not happen ?

The Common Development and Distribution License

piman — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 07:05:13 +0000

> Unlike the GPL, the CDDL allows developers to make modifications to the license text itself.

This is slightly misleading. The unmodifiable part of the GPL is the preamble, which is not technically a term of the license; one can make a license equivalent to the GPL in its terms (and so compatible with the GPL), but use only free license text. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL for more information.