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eclipsesource / J2V8

Java Bindings for V8
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EPL licensing issues #328

Open aschrijver opened 7 years ago

aschrijver commented 7 years ago

There are a couple of issues with the licensing of this project.

Most importantly there is the use of "All rights reserved" in combination with the Eclipse Public License (or any major open source license). While this term has become obsolete in terms of claiming copyright, it still has meaning that can conflict with the EPL license and lead to ambiguity.

This is best explained in this stackexchange answer: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2121/mit-license-and-all-rights-reserved

Conclusion of the article:

Stop Trying to Justify All rights reserved.

All rights reserved is a historic relic that is not relevant today for establishing copyright (the ownership part). In terms of licensing, it is detrimental to modern software licensing. The phrase has very specific, absolute meaning in the English language and can open up ambiguity in software licensing if it contradicts the rest of a license.

Personally, I suggest using the actual MIT License or my personal favorite, the ISC License, as is used by the OpenBSD project and others. All rights reserved should have never made it into a major open source license and rather than continuing its use, we need to break from the now-incorrect tradition.

Second, small issue, is that there should be a LICENSE file at root level.

I would be willing to go through the project files and code, fix the licensing issues and PR.

matiwinnetou commented 7 years ago

Very possibly @irbull might have his hands tied here, this is IBM Open Source project so I would suspect he would need to escalate this. For IBM changing it's eclipse license could be possible but due to the size of the company may not happen tomorrow (if at all).

Nevertheless thanks for pointing things out, developers are not lawyers so generally there are many traps for us here.

aschrijver commented 7 years ago

I can't imagine IBM wanting ambiguity, confusion with their license, unless it would be for nefarious reasons. "All rights reserved" does not belong in EPL.

But the article has an option for more commercial settings:

Commercial software often has phrases to the effect of "all rights reserved except as delineated below" to reserve all rights except those expressly provided in a license.

irbull commented 7 years ago

We considered (and sometimes still do) moving J2V8 to the Eclipse Foundation. That's the reason for the EPL. I also just used the standard copyright header that was used in other Eclipse projects for the same reason. I am happy to re-evaluate that, but I will need to get some outside council as I am not a lawyer.

aschrijver commented 7 years ago

Like Vert.x did :smile: See https://github.com/eclipsesource/J2V8/pull/201#issuecomment-322391360

I am also not a lawyer :+1: