Common Development and Distribution License
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The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free and open-source
software license A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both source ...
, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on 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 ...
(MPL). Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary. In 2005 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 ...
approved the license. 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, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft (" ...
(FSF) considers it a
free software license A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder (usually the author) ...
, but one which is incompatible with the
GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...
(GPL).


Terms

Derived from 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 ...
1.1, the CDDL tries to address some of the problems of the MPL.CDDL Why Summary
on sun.com (archived, 2005)
Like the MPL, the CDDL is a weak
copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose ...
license in-between
GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
license and
BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...
/
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
permissive license A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, ...
s, requiring only source code files under CDDL to remain under CDDL. Unlike strong
copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose ...
licenses like the GPL, mixing of CDDL licensed source code files with source code files under other licenses is permitted without relicensing. The resulting compiled software product ("binary") can be licensed and sold under a different license, as long as the source code is still available under CDDL, which should enable more commercial business cases, according to Sun. Like the MPL the CDDL includes a patent grant to the licensee from all contributors ("patent peace"). However, in section 2.1(d), the patent grant is lost if the code implementing a patented feature is modified.


History

The previous
software license A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both source ...
used by
Sun The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radi ...
for its open source projects was the Sun Public License (SPL), also derived from 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 ...
. The CDDL license is considered by
Sun The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radi ...
(now Oracle) to be
SPL SPL may refer to: Association football * Saudi Professional League * Scottish Premier League * SportPesa Premier League, Kenya * Singapore Premier League * RoboCup Standard Platform League, matches between autonomous robots Computing Program ...
version 2. The CDDL was developed by a Sun Microsystems team (among them Solaris kernel engineer Andrew Tucker and Claire Giordano), based on the MPL version 1.1. On December 1, 2004 the CDDL was submitted for approval to 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 ...
and was approved as an
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 ...
in mid January 2005. The second CDDL proposal, submitted in early January 2005, includes some corrections that prevent the CDDL from being in conflict with European Copyright law and to allow single developers to use the CDDL for their work. In 2006, in the first draft of the OSI's
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 ...
committee report, the CDDL is one of nine preferred licenses listed as popular, widely used, or with strong communities. While 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, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft (" ...
(FSF) also considered the CDDL a
free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
license, they saw some incompatibilities with their
GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...
(GPL).


GPL compatibility

The question of whether and when both licenses are incompatible sparked debates in the free software domain in 2004 to 2006. For instance, the FSF considered the CDDL incompatible to their GPL license, without going into detail until 2016. CDDL is one of several
Open Source Licenses 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 ...
which are incompatible with GPL. This characteristics was inherited from the MPL 1.1 (fixed with the MPL 2.0 according to the FSF) and results from a complex interaction of several clauses; the root of the problem being GPL virality, similar to other cases of GPL incompatibility. Some people argue that Sun (or the Sun engineer) as creator of the license made the CDDL intentionally GPL incompatible. According to Danese Cooper one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible. Simon Phipps (Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at the time), who had introduced Cooper as "the one who actually wrote the CDDL", did not immediately comment, but later in the same video, he says, referring back to the license issue, "I actually disagree with Danese to some degree", while describing the strong preference among the engineers who wrote the code for a BSD-like license, which was in conflict with Sun's preference for something
copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose ...
, and that waiting for legal clearance to release some parts of the code under the then unreleased GNU GPL v3 would have taken several years, and would probably also have involved mass resignations from engineers (unhappy with either the delay, the GPL, or both—this is not clear from the video). Later, in September 2006, Phipps rejected Cooper's assertion in even stronger terms. Similarly, Bryan Cantrill, who was on Sun at that time and involved in the release of CDDL licensed software stated in 2015 that he and his colleagues expected in 2006 the fast emerge of CDDL licensed software into the Linux ecosystem and the CDDL being not an obstacle.


cdrtools controversy

The GPL compatibility question was also the source of a controversy behind a partial relicensing of cdrtools to the CDDL which had been previously all GPL. In 2006, the Debian project declared the cdrtools legally undistributable because the build system was licensed under the CDDL. The author, Jörg Schilling, claimed that smake is an independent project and does not violate the
GPLv3 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
. Schilling also argued that even though the GPL requires all scripts required to build the work to be licensed freely, they do not necessarily have to be under the GPL. Thus not causing an incompatibility that violates the license. He also argued that in "combined works" (in contrast to " derived works") GPL and CDDL licensed code is compatible. Red Hat's attorneys have prevented cdrtools from being in Fedora or
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop ...
, arguing that Schilling has an "unorthodox" view of copyright law that isn't shared by their legal counsel or the Free Software Foundation.


ZFS in the Linux kernel

In 2015, the CDDL to GPL compatibility question reemerged when
Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...
announced inclusion of
OpenZFS OpenZFS is a free and open-source storage platform licensed under CDDL that encompasses the functionality of traditional filesystems and logical volume manager. It includes protection against data corruption, support for high storage capaciti ...
by default. In 2016 Ubuntu announced that a legal review resulted in the conclusion that it is legally acceptable to use ZFS as binary
kernel module In computing, a loadable kernel module (LKM) is an object file that contains code to extend the running kernel, or so-called ''base kernel'', of an operating system. LKMs are typically used to add support for new hardware (as device drivers) and/o ...
in Linux. (As opposed to building it into the kernel image itself.) Others followed Ubuntu's conclusion, for instance James E. J. Bottomley argued there can not be "a convincing theory of harm" developed, making it impossible to bring the case to court.
Eben Moglen Eben Moglen (born 1959) is an American legal scholar who is professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center. Professional biography Moglen started out as ...
, co-author of the
GPLv3 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
and founder of the SFLC, argued that while the letters of the GPL might be violated, the spirit of both licenses is unharmed, which would be the relevant aspect in court. The SFLC mentioned also that a precedent exists with the
Andrew File System The Andrew File System (AFS) is a distributed file system which uses a set of trusted servers to present a homogeneous, location-transparent file name space to all the client workstations. It was developed by Carnegie Mellon University as part of ...
's kernel module, which is not considered a derivative work of the kernel by the kernel developers. On the other hand,
Bradley M. Kuhn Bradley M. Kuhn (born 1973) is a free software activist from the United States. Kuhn is currently Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence of the Software Freedom Conservancy, having previously been executive director. Until 2010 he was the FLOSS C ...
and attorney Karen M. Sandler from the Software Freedom Conservancy argued that Ubuntu would violate both licenses, as a binary ZFS module would be a derivative work of the kernel, and announced their intent to clarify this question, even by court. In April 2016, the
Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...
16.04  LTS release included the CDDL-licensed
ZFS on Linux OpenZFS is a free and open-source storage platform licensed under CDDL that encompasses the functionality of traditional filesystems and logical volume manager. It includes protection against data corruption, support for high storage capaci ...
.


Adoption

Example projects released under CDDL: * OpenSolaris (including
DTrace DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released und ...
, initially released alone, and
ZFS ZFS (previously: Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris – including ZFS – were published under an ope ...
) *
illumos Illumos (stylized as illumos) is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It is based on OpenSolaris, which was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Illumos comprises a kernel, device d ...
(as OpenSolaris OS/Net, continuation project) and illumos distributions *
OpenZFS OpenZFS is a free and open-source storage platform licensed under CDDL that encompasses the functionality of traditional filesystems and logical volume manager. It includes protection against data corruption, support for high storage capaciti ...
multi platform open source volume manager and file system *
NetBeans NetBeans is an integrated development environment (IDE) for Java. NetBeans allows applications to be developed from a set of modular software components called ''modules''. NetBeans runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and Solaris. In addition to Java ...
IDE and RCP *
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 ...
*
Payara Server Payara Server is an open-source application server derived from GlassFish Server Open Source Edition. It was created in 2014 by C2B2 Consulting as a drop in replacement for GlassFish after Oracle announced it was discontinuing commercial sup ...
*
JWSDP The Java Web Services Development Pack (JWSDP) is a free software development kit (SDK) for developing Web Services, Web applications and Java applications with the newest technologies for Java. Oracle replaced JWSDP with GlassFish. All component ...
*
Project DReaM ''Project Dream'' was the codename of a role-playing video game (RPG), ''Dream: Land of Giants'', that served as the basis for the 1998 game '' Banjo-Kazooie''. Developed by Rare, it was aimed for release on the Super Nintendo Entertainment S ...
* Bourne shell * cdrtools *
OpenDJ OpenDJ is a directory server which implements a wide range of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and related standards, including full compliance with LDAPv3 but also support for Directory Service Markup Language (DSMLv2). Written in Java, Open ...


See also

*
Dual-licensing Multi-licensing is the practice of distributing software under two or more different sets of terms and conditions. This may mean multiple different software licenses or sets of licenses. Prefixes may be used to indicate the number of licenses ...
*
GNAT Modified General Public License The GNAT Modified General Public License (short: Modified GPL, GMGPL) is a version of the GNU General Public License specifically modified for compiled units and for the generic feature found in the Ada programming language. The modification is ...
* List of software licenses


References


External links

* ** ** ** **
FAQ on CDDL on Open Solaris Site

Copyrights, Licenses and CDDL Illustrated
on oracle.com (2006)
The Common Development and Distribution License
Linux Weekly News LWN.net is a computing webzine with an emphasis on free software and software for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It consists of a weekly issue, separate stories which are published most days, and threaded discussion attached to ever ...
Editorial (December 8, 2004)
CDDL Analysis from a DFSG perspective, and Opinion Piece
(2005) {{DEFAULTSORT:Common Development And Distribution License Free and open-source software licenses Copyleft Sun Microsystems