JSR-94 License questions

[Mike Van]

The JSR-94 license agreement appears quite restrictive. Specifically, you may only review it for 30 days (section 3.1), you may not use the package for any purpose other than "internal evaluation and testing" (section 3.2.i), and that we'll "stop using and destroy the Specification Package in thier entirety within 30 days from the date of the download of the Specification package" (section 3.2.iii).

Dont' get me wrong, I'd love to download this spec and use it for my US Gov't client, however this license presents a clear obstacle to adoption of this technology. What's the real deal here? Who wants to get paid in order to allow use of this spec? I see the license is from BEA, do they own the right to license the technology? Is there someone I can speak with from BEA who has the authority to negotiate this license?

(What is this and why do we care?) The JSR-94 specification identifies an API that many new rules engines are using. This is important because it will allow developers to create a single set of code to interface with a rules engine, instead of a new codebase for every new rules engin. JSR-94 reference implementation also works with Jess.
[ May 30, 2006: Message edited by: Mike Van ]

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Really something, huh? There was some debate about these terms, but probably not as much as there should have been. The person you should probably talk to would be Dan Selman, dselman (a) ilog (dot) fr .

[Mike Van]

Its ok, my company is a BEA partner; getting some sort of modification shouldn't be too hard. And, if it is, Jboss Rules is distributed under the Apache Software Foundation license. Although it uses a different language, and we'll have to scrap 3 years worth of development, at least its free. We only intend to use the JSR-94 interface functions anyhow.

Too bad though, I was starting to like Jess...

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Originally posted by Mike Van:

Too bad though, I was starting to like Jess...

I'm confused -- I don't follow your logic here. First, JSR-94 is not needed to use Jess, and in fact, it's discouraged because Jess's own API is more powerful. But if you choose to use JSR-94 anyway, then you don't need to use any part of the JSR-94 specification package to use the JSR-94 API with Jess; Jess 7 comes with everything you need. That strange license only covers the specification package itself, downloaded from Sun.

[Mike Van]

Jess 7 it is then! (JSR 94 is a requirement). And now, all is well.