Common Development and Distribution License

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL), version 1.1. The Free Software Foundation considers it a free license incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL).^[1] The CDDL was submitted for approval to the Open Source Initiative on December 1, 2004 and approved as an open source license in mid January 2005. In the first draft of the OSI's license proliferation committee report, the CDDL is one of nine licenses listed as popular, widely used or with strong communities. ^[2]

The previous license used by Sun for its free software/open source projects was the Sun Public License (SPL), also derived from the MPL. The CDDL license is considered by Sun as a SPL version 2.^[3]

Sun products released under CDDL:

OpenSolaris (including DTrace, initially released alone, and ZFS)
NetBeans IDE and RCP
GlassFish
JWSDP
Project DReaM

1 Controversy
2 References
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Controversy

Several people and groups have issues with the CDDL's terms and its compliance to various licensing rules, especially the Debian Free Software Guidelines (adapted from http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/08/msg00024.html and elsewhere):

Choice-of-venue (CDDL Section 9: "Any litigation relating to this License shall be subject to the jurisdiction of the courts located in the jurisdiction and venue specified in a notice contained within the Original Software, with the losing party responsible for costs, including, without limitation, court costs and reasonable attorneys’ fees and expenses."): the CDDL allows the author to "patch in" requirements about the location and jurisdiction of a legal dispute concerning the software. Some people claim that this can create an unforeseeable burden on the user of the software.
No anonymity (CDDL Section 3.3: "You must include a notice in each of Your Modifications that identifies You as the Contributor of the Modification."): this could fail the dissident test.

In the words of Danese Cooper, who is no longer with Sun, one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible. "Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris. [...] the engineers who wrote Solaris [...] had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that". [1]

Simon Phipps (Sun's Chief Open Source Officer), expressly rejects Cooper's assertion. [2]