Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's Blog

What are the JRL and the JDL licenses?

Some of you observant types may have noticed that some recent JSRs, like JAX-WSA list JRL and JDL in section 2.18, "Terms and Conditions". The JRL we knew, it is the Java Research License introduced at J1 '03. The JDL is a new license, the Java Distribution License. IANAL and all disclaimers apply, but, here is my operational micro-summary of these two.

JRL and JDL are much simpler that some of the licenses used by Sun in the past, like SCSL: JRL is under 2 pages, JDL under 4. Neither carries some of the most complicated clauses of SCSL but both remain committed to the Java compatibility requirement and are not, to my knowledge, OSI-approved. In a nutshell, the JRL is for research and internal use; the JDL is for commercial deployment.

The JDL licenses just started being available. The first actual deployments are JAX-RPC and JAXB, but Common Annotations for the Java Platform and JAX-WSA indicate they will also use JDL, and other specification efforts are likely to use JDL too. I expect that, as was the case with JRL, some of the details of the JDL will change as the requirements of other specs are folded into it and it is quite likely that we will end with several versions of JDL due to conflicting needs.

JDL grants the right to do changes and then distribute the result, provided the changes are compatible. Compatibility is defined through the specification and the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK). Sun is making the JAXB and JAX-RPC TCKs available for free to be used to help test the compatibility of these RIs (and derivative artifacts) but that is not necessarily the case for all APIs placed under the JDL.

Hope this clarifies things a bit. I've been involved in the process for the JAX-RPC and JAXB versions of JDL and I believe they address those requirements that were not fullfilled by the JRL, but if I'm wrong, I'm sure somebody will tell me :-)...

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