IBM Public License

Home: Software Licenses

Articles

Copyright Issues
Open Source & Derivative Works

GPL Issues
GPL Validity
GPL Violations
WordPress & the GPL

Legal Cases
ProCD v. Zeidenberg
USL v. BSDi

Glossary

Open Source

Licenses
   AGPL
   Apache
   Apple
   Artistic
   BSD
   CDDL
   CPL
   EPL
   GPL v2
   GPL v3
   IPL
   LGPL
   MIT
   Mozilla
   SPL
   X License
   X11 License

Organizations
   ASF
   FSF
   OSI
   SFLC

People
   Bruce Perens
   Eben Moglen
   Eric Raymond
   Lawrence Lessig
   Linus Torvalds
   Richard Stallman

Proprietary Licenses

Shared Source Licenses

MS Community License
MS Permissive License

Uncopyrighted

Public Domain

Further Reading

Books

Software Licenses > Open Source > Licenses > IPL

The IBM Public License (IPL) is a FLOSS license, developed by IBM, which has been ratified by the Open Source Initiative as being compliant with their Open Source Definition, and by the Free Software Foundation.

The license is broadly similar to, but incompatible with, the GPL. Some of the noteable features of the IPL are:

It places liability on the publisher or distributor of the licensed program. This intended to facilitate commercial use of programs without placing people who contribute to the software at risk of liability.
The license requires that commercial distributors indemnify all "upstream" originators of their legal costs for lawsuits brought about by users of the software, some people argue that the license exposes small distributors to potentially excessive and unlimited legal costs.
It has certain requirements regarding patent licenses. These requirements are the principal reason for incompatibility with, the GPL.
The IPL license terminates upon patent disputes.