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CPL, EPL and License Proliferation

Hi… I'm Robert Larson, coder and community manager for the new code.intuit.com  - yeah…I'm the guy you see
in that video 🙂

When we started getting serious about sponsoring an open source community on
code.intuit.com, one
very critical decision was which license to use. Although we've generally had
very positive feedback and interest with the new open source initiative since our
announcement yesterday
, we have heard some questions around the license we
selected for the code.intuit.com. We wanted to let you know why we chose what we
did and where we are heading…

Why CPL?

There are a number of business friendly open source licenses to choose from
cataloged by the Open Source Initiative. For a number of
reasons we settled on the Common Public
License
 (CPL). We felt that the CPL license aligned well with our business
strategy, and specifically that it requires the shared responsibility and
indemnification. That makes sense for an open source (but commercially oriented)
community as the one we are trying to establish.

While we did consider more liberal licenses such as an MIT license, it
came down to the long term intent. We want the code in the code.intuit.com
projects to be the foundation of a community supported infrastructure and we
believe that CPL is the most appropriate license for that goal.

CPL Superseded by EPL? Ok…

We made that decision in the February timeframe – License Selected, check!

We then went to work to make sure that our code was clean, we had the right
copyright notices in place and a process in place for accepting contributions –
Code Ready, check!

Unfortunately, we were so busy, we didn't notice that CPL
is being superseded by EPL
. The two licenses are very close, as the
above link says,  "the licenses effectively differ by about one-and-a-half
sentences"
.

Reduce License Proliferation

We want to do our part to help reduce license proliferation. So…the net
update is we will"most likely"* be moving to EPL directionally and
converting things over to EPL as we get the opportunity.

*Our OS patent lawyer is on vacation, so I need to say "most likely".


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