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All,
The Eclipse Board Committee for IP matters met today, and we are
proposing two changes to the draft that we discussed on the call
yesterday. Comments, of course, are welcomed.
- We slightly tweaked the definition of Distribution to read as
follows:
“Distribute” means the act of distributing or making
available in any manner which enables the transfer of a copy.
- We discussed the topic of third party beneficiaries and
enforcement at length. To a large degree, we believe that this
discussion originates back to an assumption made by Andrew Katz
made when he said that the draft EPL would "...act to make this
contract enforceable by licensees and recipients. I’m assuming
that’s not the intention...". In fact, we think that is exactly
what the EPLv1 does, and we think that it would be reasonable to
enable Recipients to demand source code from Contributors if
necessary. We realize that is quite different than the norm in
GPL enforcement, but we believe we should continue it if for no
other reason than backwards compatibility for the existing
participants in the EPL license community.
That said, we do think that Andrew's comments about UK law are
important to deal with. For that reason we are proposing to add
the following sentence to the end of Section 7:
"Nothing in this Agreement is intended to be
enforceable by any entity that is not a Contributor or
Recipient, and third party beneficiary rights are excluded."
I read through the thread earlier today by Andrew Katz and Till
Jaeger, and I have to admit that it exceeds my ability to pretend
I'm a lawyer. But I note once again that it seems that a lot of it
hinges on the assumption that enforceability by Recipients is to be
avoided. As mentioned above, that is not how we read EPLv1. But we
look forward to being educated on the perils of continuing to follow
that approach.
Just so everyone knows, we will be referring the draft EPLv2 to the
OSI license-review process, hopefully late next week.
We look forward to your feedback. If another call would be more
efficient than email, please let me know.
--
Mike Milinkovich
mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(m) +1.613.220.3223
Please note the change to my email address.
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