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	Wednesday, June 4, 2003

WSBPEL Royalty-Free Licenses Released This post (and this weblog) has a new home. BEA, IBM, and Microsoft have all released royalty-free licenses for their rights in the WS-BPEL specification: BEA's license is here. IBM's license is an attachment to this message.  (The attachment is an MS Word document; you'll need to rename it once you save it.) Microsoft's license is here.  (Oddly, the web page is entitled "License for WS-Security"...) Each of the licenses has some interesting provisions, e.g., IBM's license (see 6.2) only applies to compliant implementations, but I haven't taken the time to read them all fully yet.  (I'm not a lawyer, but I've negotiated and signed a lot of contracts.)  The only annoying item that I've encountered so far is the "no sublicenses" requirement in Microsoft's and IBM's licenses.  (See, e.g., sections 2.1 and 2.2 of Microsoft's license and the more subtle section 1.2c of IBM's license.)  This requires all end-users to license from IBM and Microsoft, much the same way that distributors of many of Sun's Java products must require their customers not to redistribute some libraries. The most interesting condition is the GPL-like "Necessary Claims" condition that requires licensees to grant royalty-free licences to patents related to implementing the "required portions" of BPEL4WS.  This clearly binds the results of the OASIS effort under the same rules (which is good, in my humble opinion). The only potentially open items are similar licenses from SAP AG and Siebel.  (And section 3 of the OASIS IPR document indicates that they're coming.) 9:15:32 PM