More on JBoss Developer Studio licenses

The post “Free of lock-in and open source — features that matter” presented information about why certain open source licenses were chosen for JBoss Developer Studio and that those licenses did not restrict the usage of the bundled Eclipse plugins by other Eclipse vendors.

Following that, I was contacted by JBoss Developer Studio project lead Max Rydahl Andersen, who corrected the post on licensing details.

His point is that the licenses chosen are more and varied than I posted, and were chosen specifically to allow maximum freedom. No licenses prevent their usage or forking by others, including other commercial versions.

From that discussion, here is a clearer picture of the mix of licenses:

JBoss Developer Studio is released under the GPL as a distribution, but that is not the license of all components. This is similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is overall under the GPL and many components within are different open source licenses.

The parts inside of JBoss Developer Studio are a mix of (mostly) EPL, LGPL, and ASL.. In specific:

• The EPL is used for Eclipse, WTP, Spring IDE, and JBoss RichFaces (now includes Ajax4jsf), the tools open sourced from Exadel with additional development by JBoss.
• The LGPL is used for a number of JBoss tools such as the Hibernate tools, JBoss Application Server tools, JBoss jBPM, and so on.
• The ASL is used for TestNG and some of the jars.
• There is also a Mozilla license used for the embedded Gecko engine.

The result is a 100% open source, vendor supported Java developer IDE without lock-in.

This entry was posted by Karsten Wade on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Developer Studio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.