Sun's CDDL is based on Mozilla's MPL, and is expectedly incompatible with GPL.

What about the MPL itself? Is the CDDL compatible with the MPL?


For new projects, you should avoid the MPL as it has issues with the European law system. For this reason, the CDDL can be seen as the sucsessor of the MPL.

Given that both licenses disallow to change the license but limit their scopt to files, you are still allowed to combine files under different licenses to make them together compile a single work.

  • 1
    What sorts of issues? Wasn't MPL 2.0 released half a decade after CDDL, whereas CDDL was based on MPL 1.1, as per web.archive.org/web/20090219104442/http://www.sun.com/cddl/…? – cnst Nov 18 '15 at 22:42
  • I am sorry, I would need to search as well again. The MPL2 does not solve the issues. BTW: you could try to compare the CDDL proposal from December 2004 with the final text. The differences (with one exception) are all a result from a long phone call I had with the Sun legal department in December 2004. They include a fix for the European law issue. If you locate the differences you may be faster then I would be as I need to go to bed now. – schily Nov 18 '15 at 23:15
  • Here is a link to thel CDDL draft from December 2004 and this includes a redline PDF for the old version: web.archive.org/web/20041207050312/http://www.sun.com/cddl – schily Nov 19 '15 at 13:34
  • You could compare the old and the new CDDL text. I may need to have a new look at MPL-2.0 and check which of the MPL-1.1 issues have been addressed by MPL-2.0. The most obvious issues from MPL-1.1: 1) It does not work for individuals but only for companies, 2) it has the jurisdiction in Santa Clara California. – schily Nov 19 '15 at 13:44
  • Hm, it only has the redline for MPL, not against an older CDDL draft. As for Santa Clara County, isn't that just one of the conditions that's likely invalid for MPL in many circumstances, without invalidating the rest of the licence? Also, is just "entity" really different than "individual or entity" as to make it not work for non-companies? In fact, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity explicitly mentions that an entity can be a natural person, too, so not sure that it can be said that MPL 1.1 doesn't work for individual contributors. – cnst Nov 19 '15 at 18:36

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