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Comment by benterix | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. The wiki says: "The Eclipse Public License is designed to be a business-friendly free software license, and features weaker copyleft provisions than licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL)."

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Well, it's just they think it's business-friendly.

From EPL:

> If a Contributor Distributes the Program in any form, then: a) the Program must also be made available as Source Code, in accordance with section 3.2 ...

Except in startups that really embrace the idea of open source, no "serious" company will offer any portion of their source code under EPL license, even if that's just the modified/derived part of it. Not a chance.

For most companies, in reality, there are only two types of licenses -- copyleft and permissive, no middle ground. You either don't touch it with a 10 foot pole or do whatever you want as long as you copy and paste the attributions.

> if a Contributor Distributes

Doesn't this only apply to contributors and dev users?

I think it applies to anyone who distributes it; https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/ says:

    “Contributor” means any person or entity that Distributes the Program.

So this basically depends on how you intend to use. All big corporations use tons of copyleft software, starting with Linux. But if your aim is to take a piece of software, modify it, and don't share your modifications, and this scenario makes you not to choose this particular project, then yes, the license is working as expected. Whether the net benefit of this is positive or not is another question.

There are a pretty large number of "serious" companies that distribute code under the GNU GPL, which has similar but more stringent copyleft terms. IBM, for example, which also originated the Eclipse Public License, and TI, and ARM, and Apple. Almost every microcontroller vendor uses GCC.

I meant "product code" mostly, and of course you could say WebKit is part of a product and you'll be correct. My point is that it's the exception, not the norm. (Using "no company" was wrong on my end)

Can't you buy an exception to the license?

Not my call.

Don't most companies seek a supported product, like yWorks or Tom Sawyer Software in the case of graph layout?

Isn't the EPL "weak copyleft", so LGPL-ish? Would companies raise similar issues about glibc and GNU libstdc++? Just curious.

True, and in fact I am aware that other teams look for paid solutions where graphs power the core features of their products. For us, it is a small feature, so we were looking for the "least trouble" path.

I don't know enough about all those other libraries and their licenses, but I do know that as long as we don't ship those libraries, especially modified versions, it's likely ok (of course that's simplified). Some internal tooling depends on GNU tools but we are just users. For things like glibc, it's just a standard system library, so linking with it is not a problem. (I am sure legal has looked at this.)

But GPL/LGPL software is definitely the minority of software we use in any way. Basically they need to be avoided as much as possible.

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