The Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) is now a retired free and

open source license Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative ...

, recognized as such by the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985. The organisation supports the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

and the

Open Source Initiative The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a California public benefit corporation "actively involved in Open Source community-building, education, and public advocacy to promote awareness and the importance of non-proprietary software". Governance The ...

(OSI). Under SISSL, developers could modify and distribute source code and derived binaries freely. Furthermore, developers could choose to keep their modifications private or make them public. However, the SISSL is unique among OSI-approved licenses in requiring that "The Modifications which You create must comply with all requirements set out by the Standards body in effect one hundred twenty (120) days before You ship the Contributor Version." If the Modifications do not comply, SISSL becomes a copyleft license, and source must be published "under the same terms as this license ISSLon a

royalty-free Royalty-free (RF) material subject to copyright or other intellectual property rights may be used without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales. Computer standards ...

basis within thirty (30) days." Several open source projects funded by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

were licensed under SISSL, including

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice being considered mostly d ...

, and

Sun Grid Engine Oracle Grid Engine, previously known as Sun Grid Engine (SGE), CODINE (Computing in Distributed Networked Environments) or GRD (Global Resource Director), was a grid computing computer cluster software system (otherwise known as a batch-queuing ...

(SGE). Later versions of OpenOffice.org were dual-licensed under the SISSL and

LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

until the retirement of the SISSL, at which time OpenOffice.org was relicensed only under the LGPL. Sun Grid Engine appears to still be covered by the SISSL. Sun's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps announced the retirement of the license on September 2, 2005 to combat

license proliferation License proliferation is the phenomenon of an abundance of already existing and the continued creation of new software licenses for software and software packages in the FOSS ecosystem. License proliferation affects the whole FOSS ecosystem neg ...

. It is now listed by OSI as "voluntarily retired" by Sun, and the OSI license page states that "Sun has ceased to use or recommend this license." OpenOffice.org 2.0 code, for example, is now licensed exclusively under the LGPL. Sun developed the

Common Development and Distribution License The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free and open-source software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under oth ...

, a variant of the

Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird. The MPL is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of bo ...

and later released

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system for SPARC and x86 based systems, created by Sun Microsystems and based on Solaris. Its development began in the mid 2000s and ended in 2010. OpenSolaris was developed as ...

and the

GlassFish GlassFish is an open-source Jakarta EE platform application server project started by Sun Microsystems, then sponsored by Oracle Corporation, and now living at the Eclipse Foundation and supported by OmniFish, Fujitsu and Payara. The support ...

Application Server under that license.

References

External links

Sun Industry Standards Source License - Version 1.1
(OpenOffice.org)

(Sun Grid Engine)

Wikinews Sources

* * * *{{citation, url=http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/addressing_proliferation_deeds_not_just , title=Addressing Proliferation: Deeds not just Words , author=Simon Phipps , publisher=

, date=September 2, 2005 Free and open-source software licenses Sun Microsystems