Thread: software components with conflicting licences

You earlier mentioned Samrat's master's thesis that was focused on the distribution of software components with conflicting licences Can you elaborate on how licensing issues were taken care of since many of the individual components are released under different licences, which are not necessarily compatible, and then the aggregate, that is CAFE. was released under EPL?

Samrat's thesis provides a more elaborate mechanism for distributing conflicting software components. For the sake of brevity, I will not go into details here. In the case of CAFE, the stack includes EPL, Apache, GPLv2, and other licences. Of course, GPLv2 is often recognised as being in conflict with these licences, as clauses in both licences cannot be true at the same time.

Since the components are not derivative works of the GPLv2 components, we avoided 'contamination' of the overall stack. The CAFE plug-in itself and the overall stack is under EPL. This approach is much like Linux distributions. The demo applications we provided do depend on Ingres (GPLv2 license) and thus it made sense to distribute them as GPLv2.