| Re: [mihini-dev] Mihini Licensing for redistributable runtime parts ? |
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Hello Cuero, Hello Pascal – The EPL is great for any “tooling” kind of software, but it’s problematic when it comes to deploying “runtimes” on devices. If you follow the documentation on why the EDL was introduced, that’s exactly the reason
why it was done. For some background material, see the
18-Jun-2008 Eclipse Board Meeting Minutes [1] (search “EDL”) along with the
Exhibit P Presentation [2] especially slide 11 ff. There are more examples of EDL discussions when you google “Eclipse Board EDL”. At Wind River, we’re looking at Mihini for an internal innovation project, but the license is a KO-criterion for us: when it remains EPL only we can’t ever deploy it on any commercial devices, thus our research
project would be useless. We’d immediately stop with Mihini and look at alternatives. Regarding the terms that “force you to contribute back”: In my own experience, this “legal force to contribute back” doesn’t work in practice. There are lots of clones of EPL software on github, but having access
to those clones doesn’t help you when the maintainers of those clones don’t care working with the project and merging back their changes. So in my personal opinion, whether you receive contributions is not a question of EPL versus EDL, but it’s a question of trust and collaboration with your communities. When you make it easy for adopters to contribute
back, they will do so because they benefit from their own changes being maintained along with mainstream. You’ll have to make up your minds yourselves – but given that you’re appealing to embedded runtimes, and given that you have C code that’s meant to be linked against embedded runtimes I strongly suggest considering
the EDL for your project. Let me know if I can help with any questions ! [1]
http://www.eclipse.org/org/foundation/boardminutes/2008_06_18-19_Minutes.php [2]
http://www.eclipse.org/org/foundation/boardminutes/2008_06_exhibits/ExhibitP.pdf Thanks, Martin -- Martin Oberhuber, SMTS / Product Architect – Development Tools,
Wind River direct +43.662.457915.85 fax +43.662.457915.6 From: mihini-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:mihini-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Cuero Bugot I understand that is probably the reason why Martin is asking for this EDL/EPL dual licensing. Anyhow this change would not be a small one and it needs to be validated by the board of directors (see EDL section:
http://www.eclipse.org/legal/). The bottom line being: do we want that the source code (/product) be used no matter the price (possibly no contribution back) or do we think that open source is OK as soon as we receive/retrieve
contributions. (Same category as the GPL vs BSD/MIT debate J ) From:
mihini-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:mihini-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Pascal Rapicault You want to chose that wisely because the EPL and BSD work differently in how they handle derivative work. With BSD someone can take the code, hack it all they want and ship a product from the result without ever
being obliged to make their changes available, whereas with EPL, the changes made have to be contributed to the originating project.
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