Common Public License
| Company type | Software license |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computing / Software |
| Founder | IBM |
| Products | Free and open-source software license |
| Owner | IBM |
| Website | opensource |
In computing, the Common Public License (CPL) represents a free software and open-source software license developed and released by IBM. It has received endorsement from both the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative.
Definition
The primary objective of the CPL is to facilitate cooperative development within the open-source community, while permitting compatibility with software distributed under various other licenses, including numerous proprietary licenses. The Eclipse Public License (EPL) is derived from the CPL with minor alterations.
Although the CPL shares certain provisions with the GNU General Public License (GPL), such as the obligation to disclose source code when modifying programs, there are significant distinctions. Similar to the GNU Lesser General Public License, the CPL allows linking with software not licensed under CPL without requiring the linked source code to be revealed.
The CPL is not compatible with the GPL due to its "choice of law" stated in section 7, which restricts legal actions to designated jurisdictions, alongside differing copyleft requirements.
To minimize license fragmentation, IBM and the Eclipse Foundation have agreed to exclusively use the EPL going forward. As a result, the Open Source Initiative classifies the CPL as deprecated and replaced by the EPL.
Projects using the Common Public License
- Microsoft has distributed several projects under CPL on SourceForge, including Windows Installer XML (WiX), Windows Template Library (WTL), and the FlexWiki engine.
- Certain initiatives from the COIN-OR Foundation also adopt the CPL license.