History of the IPL Project

The version of the licence available at present is EXPERIMENTAL. Please read the information below carefully if you are considering using the licence.

The Current Version of the IPL is Version 1.00.

Version 1.00 of the IPL is an experimental version produced because some of us wished to release code under the licence as an experiment and we were prepared to risk the fact that we haven't been able to obtain detailed legal feedback. We have agreed that there is some risk that our interests might be compromised by a legal or technical glitch somewhere in the licence document and we are willing to take that risk (although we do not believe the risk is significant).

Changes include: Incorporation of additional patent restriction based on Mozilla 1.1 clause 2.2(d); clarification allowing users to evaluate a single copy for a period of thirty days; addition of new Mozilla clauses 8.2 - 8.4 (concerning patents). Responsibility for claims clause altered to reflect that in MPL V1.1 clause 12. I stayed with the patent mod. from version 0.04 because it seemed abundantly clearer than Mozilla's fix for the problem. Clarification added that passive storage without use or distribution is permitted without charge.

Mozilla changes not included: The Multiple Licence clause Mozilla 13 (because it opens a can of worms, and no one can stop you issuing your own original code under multiple licences in any case - although I think it is a bad idea); MPL 2.1(c) (this refers to Commercial Use under a different definition from that in the IPL, and seems obsessively legalistic anyway).

Other changes: The proposition to which users must consent in 2.1.1 has been weakened. Indemnity by Contributors altered to cover inadvertent violations of the licence. 2.3.2: disallowed no-modification stipulations on program comments. 3.3: protection against a 'software bloat' swindle added. 5: allows specification of covered code in a LEGAL file. 6.2: protection against reversion to earlier versions of the licence added. The deemed line length of non-line-oriented files altered from 40 to 60 bytes/line. 2.2.5 Altered to make it easier for a commercial contributor to defend against legal action for modifying the AUTHORS file. Added 1.28 to clarify the definition of fully costed commercial software. Clarified 3.6 on how to offer commercial executables without imposing IPL royalty and fee rules on customers. Altered 1.16 to cover any entity's associates.

In Version 0.04, lots of changes were made to address specific objections and defects pointed out during the discussion, and I wish to thank everyone who took the trouble to comment. The main structural conclusion I drew from the comments was that the notion of a pure moral obligation disconnected from legality is, unfortunately, too radical to be widely understood at present. To introduce the idea in a practical manner, therefore, this version stipulates a specific legal obligation upon commercial operatives to pay appropriately for their usage of the software, but declines to legally enforce this obligation, thus leaving the user to decide, on moral grounds, whether to pay. This has the advantage that everyone understands the idea of a contract with a price for a service or commodity, whilst preserving the idea of holding business to ethical standards.

A change was also made to the clause about patents, in view of a problem raised about the original Mozilla licence in the newsgroup netscape.public.mozilla.license by Roy T. Fielding of the Department of Information & Computer Science (fielding@ics.uci.edu), University of California, Irvine. He explained the problem as follows:

Specifically, 2.2(b) applies the license under patents to the entire Contributor Version, including portions that were not added to the Contributor Version by the contributor. Legally speaking, by contributing any piece of code to the Mozilla source base, the contributor is giving away a non-exclusive license to every current and future patent they or their company may hold over patented algorithms anywhere within the Mozilla source base at the time of their (unrelated) contribution, regardless of whether or not they are aware those patented algorithms were added by Netscape or by some other Contributor.

As the text of the IPL was based on Mozilla, the same problem existed, so I have adopted the same solution as proposed by Roy Fielding.

Version 0.03 of the IPLwas rewritten by modifying Mozilla to introduce the moral ideas that were introduced in Version 0.01. This was subject to discussion on a number of Internet newsgroups resulting in many interesting suggestions.

Version 0.01of the IPL introduced the notion of a moral obligation, and the rationale for the project was essentially the same as with the latest version. The terms were entirely devised by the author. However, for better legal soundness, it was decided to use Netscape's Mozilla licence as a base for modification. Version 0.02 was a minor editing change and was never released.