Jini Network Technology

Introduction

Under the terms of the Sun Community Source License (SCSL), Sun shares the rights to the source code among a community of developers to enhance and evolve Jini technology. The SCSL establishes responsibilities to ensure implementations are compliant and provides an incentive for innovation and invention by allowing licensees to create proprietary enhancements in their implementations.

Blending the aspects of the proprietary and "Open Source" licensing models, the SCSL is based on a set of principles outlined by Sun Microsystems in its Community Source License Principles. The SCSL creates a body 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 compliance testing
• Proprietary enhancements including performance improvements are allowed as long as compatibility is maintained

These important differences and other details make community source a powerful combination of the best of the proprietary licensing and "Open Source" style technology licensing models.

Rights & Responsibilities

The SCSL has a two-tiered structure that outlines cumulative rights and responsibilities for having access to the source code depending on your intended use of the technology, either Research and Development or Commercial Use.

The following is a brief overview of these rights and responsibilities:

Sun Microsystems has granted to the community cumulative rights to the intellectual property within Jini technology to allow developers to use, reproduce, and modify Jini 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. However, neither Research Use licensees nor third-parties, can widely deploy Research Use implementations developed under the Research Use provisions without agreeing to the Commercial Use licensing terms.

Commercial Use licensees are granted the additional right to distribute modified, compliant code for internal deployment or for commercial gain.

The responsibilities for each type of licensee are outlined below:

Research Use licensees agree, at a minimum, to post error corrections, publish their modified source code with a special Research Use notification, and conform to certain methods for posting modifications electronically.

Commercial Use licensees, whether deploying an implementation internally or distributing a product externally, agree to additional responsibilities which are designed to ensure that their implementatin will be compatible with others. These responsibilities include conforming to certain naming conventions within the source code, publishing specifications to any extensions that they have developed, keeping the programming interfaces to their extensions open, and passing the current Jini Technology Core Platform Compatibility Kit. Commercial Use licensees who distribute commercial implementations are also responsible for distributing source code only to community licensees in good standing and upgrading their code to the current version of the technology.

Community Contributions

The SCSL was designed to support an active community of developers interested in creating innovative implementations using Jini network technology. By accommodating all levels of participation and cooperation, the SCSL fosters the development of a self-organizing community focused on all aspects of Jini technology. Its cooperative framework encourages members to join in the development of software incorporating Jini technology. Various interest groups define and refine standard interfaces for their category of services and provide useful community source and verification suites. By sharing source code, members help each other refine, modify and improve Jini technology far more efficiently than in a closed environment. By sharing responsibilities, members ensure that their programs will work with others in the community.

Licensing Process

Although there are no costs associated with using Jini network technology, you must be properly licensed.

If you have already executed the click-through SCSL mentioned above and are ready to deploy your Jini technology-based implementation within your organization or are ready to distribute your Jini technology-enabled product or service, you must agree to the terms and conditions of the Commercial Use Supplement (CUSupp) and the Technology Specific Attachment (TSA) and your implementation must have passed the appropriate test within the Jini Technology Core Platform Compatibility Kit (TCK). Go to Licenses and follow the instructions on that web page.

Distribution of any component of the Jini network technology, other than the limited distribution allowed under the Research Use provisions of the license, requires executing the CUSupp and TSA.