OVPL summary

[Lawrence Rosen]

Hi Mike,

> Similar to Mitchell, I would like to ask in what way is the 
> CPL and its derivative the Eclipse Public License (EPL) not 
> reciprocal?

I was thinking about section 4, which requires downstream commercial
distributors to indemnify upstream contributors but not vice versa. I always
presumed that was because the author of that license intentionally avoids
being a commercial distributor and seeks out others do that task.

But for the sake of this list, I'll just retract my comment so we can go on
about the OVPL.

/Larry
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Milinkovich [mailto:mike.milinkovich at eclipse.org] 
> Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2005 12:57 PM
> To: lrosen at rosenlaw.com; license-discuss at opensource.org
> Subject: RE: OVPL summary
> 
> 
> 
> > As Mark correctly says, many OSI-approved licenses, including the 
> > venerable MPL and CPL licenses, are not perfectly reciprocal. They 
> > grant (or reserve) some rights to an initial developer that other 
> > licensees don't have.
> 
> Similar to Mitchell, I would like to ask in what way is the 
> CPL and its derivative the Eclipse Public License (EPL) not 
> reciprocal?
> 
> Under both the CPL and EPL, there is no assignment made by a 
> Contributor to anyone. A Contributor retains all of their 
> rights to their contribution.
> Each Contributor under the CPL and EPL has the same rights. 
> Each Recipient (which includes all Contributors) receives the 
> same license grants.
> 
> As a concrete example, switching from the CPL to EPL required 
> the Eclipse Foundation to seek the permission of every single 
> contributor under the CPL to ask them to agree to move to the 
> EPL. That hardly seems to imply that the stewards of either 
> the CPL or the EPL have any special rights in the body of 
> code within the Eclipse community.
> 
> I have asked this list before for concise definitions of 
> reciprocity and asymmetry, to no avail. Those terms get used 
> here as somewhat pejorative terms, but I've never seen them defined. 
> 
> IANAL, but I do not understand how the EPL can be described 
> as either non-reciprocal or asymmetrical.
> 
> Mike Milinkovich
> Executive Director,
> Eclipse Foundation, Inc.
> Office: 613-224-9461 x228
> Cell: 613-220-3223
> mike.milinkovich at eclipse.org
>  
> blog: http://milinkovich.blogspot.com/