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

open source license An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions. This allows end users and commercial compa ...

, recognized as such by the

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

and the

Open Source Initiative The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software. It is a California public-benefit nonprofit corporation,_with_501(c)(3).html" ;"title="110. - 6910./ref> is a type o ...

(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 standard ...

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

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

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), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) a ...

, and Sun Grid Engine (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, 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 license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns ...

and later released

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around th ...

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 Payara, Oracle and Red Hat. The supported v ...

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