Heather J. Meeker on the CPL. It was approved in 2001 by the OSI, is a lot like the MPL. It was written to generalize the terms so that any OS originator (i.e., non-IBM) could use it.It came from the earlier IPL. Like the MPL, these licenses were intended to be accessible to lawyers and corporations. It is a viral license - version 0.5 was developed for Eclipse, the current version is 1.0.

The CPL distinguishes between original contributors and subsequent contributors. It also defines recipients. What you end up with is a stream of licensors (down the chain of contributors) - it's basically another way of saying sub-licensor, more or less (question from Larry Rosen). The CPL is explicit about copyright and patent licenses. The language I'm looking at on the screen was definitely written by a corporate lawyer - I nearly fell asleep just reading the first sentence.

Interesting isclaimer on infringement - the CPl puts the onus on the person wishing to redistribute to get patent rights if they are required. Definitely corporate friendly :) Another thing - subject to indemnification of contributors, distributors may offer different business terms to licensees. So, you can offer the software commercially for money. And another hint that this is a corporate license - the license explicitly states that each party waives its rights to a jury trial in any resulting litigation.

Interesting kicker on this last bit - the federal government has issues with automatic license termination and decisions about default litigation terms. Commercial firms probably have specific contracts for federal agencies for those cases - but that makes open source terms really interesting.