Common Development And Distribution License
Software licences are designed to govern users’ use of the software products to which they are applied. Many software licences are designed to limit the activities which users may perform. Copying, redistribution and modification are common activities which a licence will restrict. Intellectual Property rights are carefully guarded by such documents.
Open Source Software is becoming increasingly common. It is now entirely possible to have a fully functional personal computer, suitable for home or business use (and meeting all the needs thereof) using nothing other than open source software. In many cases, the software licences used with such software will be quite different to those used in proprietary software.
This Open Source Software Licence has been reproduced by Simply-docs with the permission and approval of the Open Source Initiative and is designed to be applied to a wide variety of software.
The popular and widely used Common Development and Distribution License is a free software licence created by Sun Microsystems and is based on the Mozilla Public License (also available through the related document links below). A key feature of the CDDL is that files or software licensed under the CDDL may be used with material licensed under other terms or licenses. Universal use of the CDDL is not required. This licence is thus widely compatible; however it has been declared incompatible with the GNU General Public License by the Free Software Foundation.
Other important features of this free software licence are that it requires that the source code of modifications to be made available under the open source licence, it adopts a “file-based” definition for modifications and covered software, and it includes an explicit patent license (though great care should be taken with the latter given the highly uncertain state of software patentability in the UK and Europe.)
The Common Development and Distribution License is available as a free document from Simply-docs.
Common Development And Distribution License is part of Free & Samples Documents. Just £35.00 + VAT provides unlimited downloads from Free & Samples Documents for 1 year.