While JBoss has been granted the ability to use the BPEL specification royalty-free, there are terms in its IP license that are incompatible with the LGPL. This is why we had to release it under the terms of the Common Public License (CPL).
Click here for the BPEL IPR Policy
Problematic terms include such things as:
2.3 Source Code Distribution Company also has a nontransferable, non-sublicenseable, personal, license to distribute or otherwise disclose source code copies of such Company Implementation licensed in Section 2.2 only if Company prominently displays the following notice in all copies of such source code, and (ii) distributes or discloses the source code only under a license agreement that includes the following notice as a term of such license agreement and does not include any other terms that are inconsistent with, or would prohibit, the following notice:
"This source code may incorporate intellectual property owned by SAP AG. Our provision of this source code does not include any licenses or any other rights to you under any SAP intellectual property. If you would like a license from SAP (e.g. rebrand, redistribute), you need to contact SAP directly." |
For enterprise customers simply looking to use our BPEL implementation, these terms do not apply. Conversely, software vendors who want to embed/redistribute do need to obtain a royalty-free license from the BPEL stakeholders (Microsoft, IBM, BEA, SAP and Siebel).
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