Enhydra Licensing

Preamble

Enhydra, Enhydra Enterprise, and various inclusive technologies have certain open source licenses that apply to them. We have ensured that the licenses of leveraged code are compatible and a list of components leveraged from other Open Source efforts can be found elsewhere on this site. These other licenses include: FreeBSD style, Apache, Lesser GNU (for regexp library) and a couple of artistic licenses. None of these licenses as applied to the Enhydra project restrict any commercial use or redistribution, thus the most important license to consider is EPL or the Enhydra Public License.

Enhydra Public License (EPL)

You may read the EPL license in HTML or PDF form.

The primary license covering the majority of the code is call EPL or Enhydra Public License. This license was chosen by Lutris Technologies, the primary sponsor and initial contributor to the Enhydra project. It was chosen after much heartache and research (click here to read more about the rationale) as a way to keep Enhydra open and to develop a strong community. The EPL license allows for commercial use, simply requiring the prominent display of a "use" notice. It also allows products to be built on top and distributed under any license (including commercial) so long as any modifications to the core Enhydra server are submitted back to Enhydra.org. This keeps the community strong, encourages consistency and yet does not restrict commercial use.

Early in August 2000, the original EPL 1.0 was revved to version EPL 1.1. Nothing of substance was changed, it was updated for the following reasons:

• Originally EPL was derived from Mozilla 1.0. The update is a similar derivation from Mozilla 1.1. This has clearer legal wording and keeps our laywers happy. You can view the exact deviation from Mozilla 1.1 annotated in a step by step fashion.
• A major contribution to Enhydra Enterprise is the code from Evidian (formerly Bullsoft) and from France Telecom. These companies used a very similar licenses, but with subtly different terms. EPL 1.1 is a unification of all the previous slightly different licenses.

Note: Readers who have studied EPL 1.0 (I think we have some lawyers in the community!) will notice that EPL 1.1 is broken into two pieces. The first is the actual EPL license and the second is the referenced OPL (Open Public License) base license. This OPL base is internationally neutral license terms and is shared verbatim with our friends at Evidian on the JOnAS project and JORAM (messaging project). This sharing of a common base makes it much easier to satisfy legal compatibility. We welcome adoption of the OPL by any other interested Open Source projects...

After reading this the Lutris team and I would appreciate your feedback.