Please find below some of the most frequently asked questions regarding
the licensing of ICEsoft open source and binary products. If your
question is not answered below please do not hesitate
to contact us
and we will do our best to get
your question answered. For more detail or clarity in interpreting the
Mozilla Public License, interested parties are advised to consult their
own legal counsel.
Are ICEsoft product
bundles available under licenses other than MPL 1.1?
ICEfaces Tool Integration bundles, and binary editions are available
under the ICEsoft Community Edition license
. This license covers
binary product bundles and permits free development and distribution of
the covered products. It is made accessible to you for review as part of
the download process.
ICEfaces and the ICEfaces Enterprise Production Suite are also available
under a standard ICEsoft commercial license which provides features such
as warranty and indemnification. For information on our commercial
licenses please fill out our information request form.
Lastly, ICEsoft utilizes the "Multiple Licensed Code" feature of the MPL
1.1 License that governs ICEfaces use and distribution. This feature
permits developers to use and distribute the ICEfaces code under the Gnu
Lesser Public License LGPL V 2.1 at their discretion.
Does ICEfaces
link to 3rd party software that may require different licenses?
ICEfaces is 100% standards based and is engineered to work within the
J2EE environment. As such it does require links to other 3rd party Java
libraries. Prospective downloaders should be aware that ICEsoft will
frequently bundle these 3rd party libraries alongside our own software
as part of the download package. This is done for the convenience of our
downloaders. For the most part these libraries originate from companies
such as SUN and JBoss and are licensed under APACHE or CDDL licenses. A
complete list of bundled third party libraries and their respective
license information can be found as part of your download.
Why MPL?
Our selection of MPL 1.1 was based on a set of business criteria that we
felt needed to be met in order for our open source initiative to be
successful. First we felt that we needed to use a license that was
generally recognized and well received by the open source community.
Second, we needed to be assured that the license reflect the spirit of
open source in its treatment of developer attribution and reciprocity.
Third we believed that the license needed to be clear and unambiguous in
stating that end users are under no obligation to open source their
application code, and remain free to license their software under
whatever commercial conditions they choose provided their application
code does not include any part of the original ICEfaces open source
software and that they did not modify any of the original ICEfaces open
source software. After an extensive review of license models we
determined that the MPL best met these business criteria.
What is the
concept behind a reciprocal license and why do you use it?
Reciprocity requires that any modification of the open source licensed
code must in turn be made publicly available in source code to the
entire community. The notion of reciprocity was introduced into open
source licenses to ensure that changes and improvements made to the
software will always remain available as open source. This reduces the
risk of incompatible versions of the code from being generated and
circulated amongst the community or the creation of proprietary versions
of the open source software being developed.
With MPL, the requirement to provide the source code of ICEfaces original
code and/or ICEfaces modified code only applies to code that is
distributed to third parties. If a customer makes any ICEfaces open
source modifications and only uses those modifications internally (and
does not distribute those modifications to third parties), then the
customer is not required to make the source code of such modifications
available to anyone, and the reciprocity obligation does not apply.
What is a derived
work?
Simply put, if you modify any file of the ICEfaces open source software
other than a configuration file you are creating a derived work. If you
copy and paste chunks of ICEfaces open source software or include
ICEfaces open source software which is licensed under MPL 1.1, within
the body of a different code base you are creating a derivative
work.
ICEsoft interprets its ICEfaces code base to be a dynamically linkable
software library as that term is commonly used in the industry (i.e.
code from the library never actually exists within the body of your
program). Linking to ICEfaces open source software or making function
calls on it from another program, or bundling ICEfaces open source
software alongside other applications, does not create a derivative
work. The MPL 1.1 does not require anyone to make available the source
code of programs that use ICEfaces open source software in this manner,
and permits those programs (other than the ICEfaces open source
software) to be distributed under licenses chosen by the licensor.
What can I do with
ICEfaces open source under the MPL 1.1 license?
Under the MPL 1.1 license you can:
Make and distribute unlimited copies of ICEfaces open source
software without payment of royalties or license fees.
Make changes to the source code of ICEfaces open source software and
use those changes internal to your company without having to share
those source code changes with others.
Make changes to the source code of ICEfaces open source software and
distribute those changes to any number of third parties provided you
retain the attribution to the original code developers and that you
share any code changes with your licensees by publishing the source
along with your modifications in the manner prescribed in the MPL
1.1 license.
How can I use ICEfaces
and still protect my own developed intellectual property?
Provided that you have not modified the ICEfaces open source software to
create a derivative work as described above in "What is a derived work?"
you are under no obligation to disclose your own code base. You can sell
or license your software under any license or terms that you wish,
except that any ICEfaces open source software must be distributed under
the terms of the MPL 1.1 license.
Am I free to
commercially license my code under a different license?
Yes. Provided that you have not created a derivative work of the ICEfaces
open source software, you can license your software under any license
and terms as you see fit (although ICEfaces open source software must
still be licensed under the MPL 1.1 license).
