Carla Mott's Blog

GlassFish distribution license - clarified

I wanted to try and clear up some misunderstandings about exactly what license applies to the binary distributions of GlassFish.

The majority of the GlassFish code is available under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) v1.0 and that applies to source code as well as the binary format. There are components which are open source products under different licenses such as Apache and those components are distributed under their respective license. Finally, there are a few components in GlassFish for which the source is not available and those (and ONLY those) components are covered under Sun's binary license.

Confused? We are doing two things to help clarify things. We have created a wiki which lists each component and the license which covers it. Second, we are working to make the source code available for all components such that Sun's binary license is no longer needed.

Still confused? Ask me below.

Comments

• hi carla,

  what is the rationale behind this ? Jboss/Geronimo are fully open source. how does sun intend to compete with them by being partial open source ?

  is this to prevent the above open source packages from competing with sun/glassfish ?

  thank you,

  BR,
  ~A

  Posted by: anjanb2 on April 06, 2006 at 07:17 PM

• Oh yes, stop the porn! glassfish must be secured.

  Posted by: tiffytiffyteapot on April 06, 2006 at 10:00 PM

• Hi Anjanb2.

  The intent is to move everything to CDDL (or ASL). It is just a timing issue. There is an implicit "yet" in Carla's post that probably should be made explicit. As in:

  "Finally, there are a few components in GlassFish for which the source is not *YET* available".

  Hope this helps,
  - eduard/o

  Posted by: pelegri on April 07, 2006 at 12:20 AM

• Yes, Eduardo is correct. We are in the process getting as much code out in open source and as soon as possible. There is alot of code so it will take some time but we are working on it. Thanks, Carla

  Posted by: carlavmott on April 07, 2006 at 11:30 AM

• Hi Carla,

  My name is Carlos Sanchez from the Apache Maven project and we have been trying to get in touch with the right person at Sun to allow redistribution of Sun jars through the Maven repository. If you can talk or know somebody that can talk about these issues plese drop me a line at carlos -at- apache -dot- org

  We have a huge repository of jars, sources and javadocs, but not being able to redistribute Sun's jars is really painful for the users, which can not understand what's going on with Sun
  http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-coping-with-sun-jars.html

  Posted by: carlossg on April 13, 2006 at 11:29 PM

• As far as I understand some components like JavaMail and Activation are released under CDDL for the sources and Sun binary License for the binaries, which means I can't redistribute the jar provided by Sun while I can redistribute the sources, and build a jar myself and redistribute it.

  Posted by: carlossg on April 13, 2006 at 11:40 PM

• Hi Carlos,

  I created the following page to help clarify this question. Specifically, JavaMail and Activiation are released under CDDL for both source and binary. I will follow up on the previous question. Carla

  Posted by: carlavmott on April 14, 2006 at 12:07 PM

• Thanks Carla, I'll take a closer look to this and hopefully Maven users will benefit from new releases of Sun software.

  Posted by: carlossg on April 23, 2006 at 10:48 PM

• Carlos,
  Not sure if you have seen the posts lately, but several of the GlassFish jar files were added to the java.net maven repository. More are coming as we have time. Hope this helps.
  Carla

  Posted by: carlavmott on May 05, 2006 at 06:00 PM

• Hi Carla, just a simple question...
  Does the CDDL allow me to include and redistribute portions of the glassfish sources (e.g. the jsp api) with another open source project (which is - for example - available under the Apache license)? After reading the CDDL, the answer seems to be yes. True?

  Thanks, Christoph

  Posted by: beckchr on May 23, 2006 at 02:12 PM

• Hi Christoph,

  Sorry for the delay in response. CDDL does allow for you to redistribute the code. Is your questions whether you can relicense the code too?

  Carla

  Posted by: carlavmott on May 30, 2006 at 08:58 AM

• Hi Carla,
  No, I just want to redistribute the source code as well as the compiled classes in a jar file (together with other classes). Maybe I would need to apply some modifications (e.g. bug fixes) to the code. The project itself is distributed under the Apache license.
  

  Posted by: beckchr on May 31, 2006 at 03:22 PM

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