Open source licensing question

Gurvan Le Guernic gleguern at gmail.com
Fri Jul 3 15:49:13 UTC 2009


 Dear All,

I am looking for advice about open source licensing. If it is not the 
right mailing list, please accept my apologies. In that case, could you 
direct me to the right place to ask my question?

We are developing a software that we want to release under an open 
source license (ideally preventing reuse of our code in proprietary 
software). The software uses some libraries with different open source 
licenses. We are new to open source licensing and it is not clear for us 
which open source licenses we can use. Could you provide advice on the 
matter?

Our software uses 2 libraries. Those libraries are:
  * Apache Derby, distributed under the terms of the Apache License, 
Version 2.0.
  * SWT, and some other Eclipse libraries, distributed under the terms 
of the Eclipse Public License Version 1.0, except for some third party 
content.
We have not modified those libraries. We just use them, but as we want 
to distribute a self contained version of our software we want to 
distribute those libraries with our own code.

Our software is distributed under the form of a JAR file (similar to an 
executable zip file). This JAR file contains our code and a directory 
("libs") containing the libraries under the form of JAR files. Those JAR 
files have been downloaded from their library webpage and included in 
the "libs" repository without any modification.

 From what we understood from the incompatibility between the GPLv3 and 
the Eclipse Public License, we can not distribute our software under the 
GPL v3 or under the "GPL v3 license, except for some third party content 
(Apache Derby library and Eclipse libraries including SWT)".

Which open source licenses preventing reuse of our code in proprietary 
software, which is not broken by the licenses of the 2 libraries and do 
not break the licenses of the 2 libraries, can we use?

 Sincerely,
 Gurvan Le Guernic



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