As the submitter of the EPL indicates, the EPL is substantially identical to the CPL, except for the provision in art. 7 on patent litigation, which is removed in the EPL. Though the deleted provision is certainly a substantive change, it is not pertinent to the OSD. Therefore, I recommend its approval.
As an aside, the Eclipse Foundation may find it helpful to add a clarifying statement to their website concerning the relationship - - or lack thereof - - between the EPL, CPL, and IPL for their own project software. (i.e. does one displace the other at a given point in time?) It is easy to (mistakenly?) view the EPL as a revision of the CPL and the CPL as an iteration or ostensible twin of the IPL. Rod Rod Dixon Blog: http://opensource.cyberspaces.org ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ma, Philip" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Rank, Michael J" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, March 08, 2004 6:27 PM Subject: For Approval: Eclipse Public License - v 1.0 APPROVAL REQUEST: When the Eclipse consortium was first formed in November 2001, IBM's Common Public License v 1.0 (CPL) was used to license the initial Eclipse code base as open source. The CPL was already approved by the OSI at that time as conforming to the Open Source Definition. When Eclipse evolved into the Eclipse Foundation in February 2004, the membership of the new Foundation adopted their own open source license, the Eclipse Public License v 1.0 (EPL). The EPL is based entirely on the CPL with three differences. The differences between CPL and EPL are as follows: 1) The removal of Section 7, Paragraph 2, Sentence 1 of the CPL: "If Recipient institutes patent litigation against a Contributor with respect to a patent applicable to software (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit), then any patent licenses granted by that Contributor to such Recipient under this Agreement shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed." 2) Name changed from "Common..." to "Eclipse Public License" in title and opening paragraph 3) Agreement Steward changed from IBM to Eclipse Foundation in Sec 7, Para 4, Sent 4. The Eclipse Foundation has determined that these differences have no effect on the EPL's conformance to the Open Source Definition, and respectfully requests OSI Board approval of the EPL. LICENSE ATTACHMENT, LINK: Attached is a plain text versions of the EPL. An HTML version of the EPL can be found at: http://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/epl-v10.html SUBMITTED BY: Mike Rank & Philip Ma - Eclipse Foundation Legal Advisory Committee Chairship, On Behalf of the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors Questions regarding the Eclipse Public License can be directed to: Mike Rank: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Philip Ma: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
