Hi,
There is one important thing that I would like to discuss with a broader
audience. We consider changing midPoint licence to Apache license.
There are several reasons to do that:
* CDDL is a copyleft license. We do not like that. We believe that
avoiding copyleft licensing provisions will provide more freedom for
midPoint users especially if they customize midPoint for a specific
deployment. Apache license is not copyleft license.
* CDDL is not GPL compatible. Apache license is at least partially
compatible.
* CDDL license steward is Oracle. We do not trust Oracle to maintain a
free software license in a way that provides benefits to software
freedom. We rather trust Apache Software Foundation to be much better
license steward.
In all the other important aspects the CDDL and Apache license are quite
similar (e.g. patents, linking code with different licenses, etc.)
MidPoint CDDL licensing was somehow "inherited" and we never really
liked it. We have been thinking about the licensing change for quite a
long time. We have also discussed this decision with our key partners.
But only recently we become able to really implement the change.
Currently, there is no legacy code in midPoint and Evolveum has a full
copyright for all the midPoint source code. Therefore we are free to
change the license. We will start to accept contributions to midPoint
again after the license is changed. After we start accepting
contributions the new license will in fact be fixed in place by the
copyright of the individual contributors and it is unlikely we will ever
be able to change it again. Therefore this is an important decision and
I would like to hear the opinion of broader midPoint community.
The current plan is to change midPoint license to Apache for the 2.2
release planned to happen in June.
What do you think?
--
Radovan Semancik
Software Architect
evolveum.com