This blog is about software licensing based on my personal reading of license agreements and should not be taken as advice of any kind. If you intend to act or not act based on the contents of this blog you do so at your own risk.
The OSI have approved Sun’s Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) so I thought I’d take a look and see what all the fuss is about.
When I license software I’ve usually gone for the GPL, occasionally the LGPL, or a custom commercial license (which brings joy to our solicitors).
CDDL is new for me. It’s based on the Mozilla license (MPL). Compared to the GPL, I find the Mozilla license to be a tough read – due to the phrasing, the number of parties involved and the way it extends into other areas of “intellectual property”. So the place to start with this stuff is Andrew M. St. Laurent’s wonderful book Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing. It deals with the MPL but was published before the CDDL arrived.
Here’s a summary, ignoring all the details, of how I think of the licenses (so please take a moment to re-read my disclaimer at the start of this blog). The GPL says: where ever you use this source code, the resultant project must also be made available in source form for anyone to use under the terms of the GPL. My gut reaction here is that this is what I mostly want for things I give away for free: you can’t “steal” my software and put it into a commercial product.
In contrast, the MPL says: if you modify the source code, document your changes, give us credit, make the modifications available as source, but you can use the source in another project and license that larger work however you want. This is quite a leap: here’s my freely donated code, if you make it better I want to see the changes, but otherwise go ahead and commercialize it or do whatever you want with it. In some senses that’s making the code more valuable and giving more freedoms than GPL. I’m leaning towards this style of license now.
The CDDL says: this is the MPL but cleaned up so you can use it without having to resolve disputes in, and only in, California.
It’s important to note that source licensed under the GPL cannot be mixed with source licensed under MPL or the CDDL – but see the FSFs comments on various licenses for more information. This means you need to decide where you stand on the various freedoms offered by the various licenses, or get into dual or triple licensing and everything that entails.
