Compatible Patent License
For more information about the patent licenses, view the Eclipse IP Policy page.
The link to the referenced Eclipse IP Policy document describes the difference between the 'Compatible Patent License' and the 'Implementation Patent License'.
When the CDI project was moved to Eclipse, current leads under the JCP were not consulted with regard to the choice of the patent license, even though under the JCP patent rights flowed to the lead and then back out to implementers who passed the TCK. Red Hat does not believe that patent rights should be used as a means of attempting to coerce compatibility. Red Hat would rather have maximal adoption of specifications we are involved with. Mike Milinkovich created a blog post that goes into patents and specifications that touches on the difference between the two patent license types:
Red Hat will be looking to spin up a new version of the CDI specification project that adopts the Implementation Patent License. Specification projects can only choose the license type during creation, so the only option to change the CDI specification project patent license type is to create a new incarnation of the project and archive the existing one. We expect the scope statement to be identical to the existing CDI specification project. The only proposed change will be the patent license type the project uses.
Ultimately the Specification Committee will have to vote to approve the new incarnation as defined by the EFSP:
