Community Source Licensing - Overview

The Best of Both Worlds

The Sun Community Source License (SCSL) blends the best aspects of the proprietary and "Open Source" license models. The SCSL was designed to support a developing organization and a surrounding community of participants.

Executive Summary

The Sun Community Source License (SCSL) is a license model designed for distributing source code among the developer community.

Community Source creates a community of widely available software source code similar to the Open Source model, but with the following two differences:

• Compatibility among deployed versions of the software is required and enforced through testing
• Proprietary enhancements including performance improvements are allowed, as long as compatibility is maintained

Introduction

In the contemporary world of the Internet business, the traditional principles of overly protective software ownership don't make as much sense as they used to. Today it is difficult for a single company to house all the expertise it needs to be successful, especially when a company wishes to build an infrastructure on which other businesses depend. Businesses can no longer presume to know how best to do that right out of the chute. The theory of separation of concerns and modularity work well once the dividing lines between components and infrastructure are known, but finding those lines is a collaborative effort, requiring cooperation between companies that might be competitors.

The Sun Community Source License (SCSL) is designed to balance the needs of organizations needing to innovate rapidly in order to grow with the needs of those organizations to leverage others' expertise while maintaining proprietary advantages.

How Sun developed SCSL

Sun has successfully announced the availability of several Sun technologies including Java, SPARC, and Jini via its new SCSL licensing model. The Sun Community Source Licensing program is now extended to the Sun HPC ClusterTools technology. The goal of this program is to foster a broader relationship with the technology community. Making technologies readily available for evaluation and early-stage development will increase the rate of innovation. With this effort new products can be developed more quickly and our licensees will realize increased competitiveness. Members can help each other refine, extend, and improve technologies by sharing information and test-driving technologies without the barrier of up-front fees.

With the SCSL, Sun basically shares the rights to the source code among a community of developers to enhance and evolve Sun HPC ClusterTools technology. It also helps establish responsibilities to ensure compatibility; and provides a business model that rewards innovation and invention by allowing licensees to create proprietary enhancements.

License Model Overview

The SCSL has a unique, three-tiered structure. It outlines cumulative rights and responsibilities for access to the source code that depend on how you choose to use the technology--for Research Use, Internal Deployment Use, or Commercial Use.

The following is an overview of how the license works:

Rights Granted:

Sun has granted to the community cumulative rights to the intellectual property within Sun HPC ClusterTools technology to allow developers to use, reproduce, and modify Sun HPC ClusterTools technology source code. For example:

Research Use Licensees are granted broad rights to experiment with the source code, publish and test their results, distribute examples to students and fellow researchers, and evaluate the source code for future use, either internally or commercially. However, neither they nor third-parties, can deploy Research Use findings without committing to the Internal Deployment license.

Internal Deployment Licensees, including individuals and organizations, which desire the added right to deploy Sun HPC ClusterTools technology internally, cumulative to this level of the license. At this level, licensees can distribute source code within their company for internal deployment and demonstration of their use to third parties.

Commercial Use Licensees are granted the additional rights to distribute modified, compliant code for commercial use.

The responsibilities outlined for each level of licensee are designed to provide a reliable, uniform selection of devices and services to the general public. Responsibilities are also cumulative; as exposure and use of the source code increases, so do the responsibilities to the Sun HPC ClusterTools technology.

Research Use Licensees--including personal and educational users--agree to minimal restrictions. These include posting error corrections, publishing their modified source code with a special Research Use notification, and conforming to certain methods for posting modifications electronically.

Internal Deployment Licensees agree to additional responsibilities that are designed to ensure your internal application will be compatible with commercial products you may use in-house, and as a staging point for commercial endeavors. These include conforming to certain naming conventions within the source code; publishing specifications to any extensions you have developed, keeping the programming interfaces to your extensions open, and passing the current Conformance Test Suite.

Commercial Use Licensees are ultimately responsible for ensuring that software applications and tools containing Sun HPC ClusterTools technology are compatible. Responsibilities include distributing source code only to community licensees in good standing; upgrading your code to keep with the current version of the technology; and promoting compatibility. Commercial Use licensees must sign the Commercial Use attachment.

The SCSL anticipates an emergent, self-organizing community coalescing into interest groups surrounding different sorts of services, such as communication libraries, mathematical libraries, and development environments. These interest groups define, refine, and standardize interfaces for their category of services, providing useful community source and verification suites to help you get started.

The SCSL is a mechanism to build a community that involves all levels of participants. Its cooperative framework encourages members to join in the development of software incorporating Sun HPC ClusterTools technology. By sharing source code, members can help each other refine, extend, and improve Sun HPC ClusterTools technology far more efficiently than in a closed environment. By sharing responsibilities, members are assured their programs will work with others in the community. By providing a means to keep some secrets secret and to establish a business model tailored for your specific needs, the SCSL encourages, and rewards, invention.

For more information, please refer to the license which is available for review .