Check on License of imagine

[gharris]

Check licensing issues with imagine project

[curtis]

The license for Imagine is the  CDDL, which is "a free software license that is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL). The incompatibility arises from a complex interaction of several clauses that the CDDL inherited from the MPL." (from Wikipedia).

Hence, many projects published under the CDDL also offer a GPLv2 or later option (i.e., they are dual-licensed). Technically, to pursue usage of Imagine within ImageJ (as the Envisaje application), we should ask the author if he is willing to dual-license Imagine similarly. In this way, ImageJ2/Envisaje will be usable by third parties in both GPL software and in commercial applications.

However, the Envisaje project is on hold until we have an beta version of ImageJ2 usable by Fiji. Envisaje-related tickets are being pushed to the imagej-2.5 milestone.

[curtis]

Also, a key feature of CDDL is that derivative works must also remain CDDL-licensed. So we must be very careful to keep Envisaje separate from core IJ2. It is acceptable for BSD code to call CDDL-licensed libraries, but it must be clearly stated that those libraries fall under a different license.

[curtis]

Nothing left to do for this ticket. We just need to remain aware of the issues when combining permissively licensed code with CDDL libraries.