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Common Public License - Definition and Overview |
| Related Words: Ok, Agency, Allow, Anarchy, Assignment, Assumption, Authority, Authorization, Brevet, Certificate, Chaos, Charge, Charter, Commission |
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The CPL (Common Public License) is an open source license from IBM. Its license terms have been approved by the Open Source Initiative. The Eclipse IDE is an example of work distributed under the CPL. The CPL attempts to support and encourage collaborative open source development, while still retaining the ability to use the CPL'd content with software licensed under other licenses, including many commercial licenses.
The CPL is a copyleft license, broadly similar to the GNU General Public License in its terms. The main addition is a patent clause designed to prevent unscrupulous contributors from contributing code which infringes on their patents, and then attempting to charge royalties; in such a situation, the CPL requires the contributor to grant a royalty-free license to all recipients. This additional requirement renders the CPL incompatible with the GPL (in the opinion of Eben Moglen), though it is possible that a future version of the GPL will adopt a similar, compatible clause.
Microsoft has released their Windows Installer XML (WiX) developer tool, Windows Template Library (WTL) and the FlexWiki engine under the CPL as Sourceforge projects.
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