OVPL summary

[Mike Milinkovich]

> 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/