qooxdoo releases 0.6.5 and above are dual-licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

Version 0.6.4 and below are licensed solely under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

Please keep in mind that the following information does not constitute legal advice. You may want to additionally consult a lawyer.

“Ignorance of the law is not an excuse”.

For a full understanding of your rights and obligations under these licenses, please see the full text of the LGPL and/or EPL.

One important aspect of both licenses (so called “weak copyleft” licenses) is that if you make any modification or addition to the qooxdoo code itself, you MUST put your modification under the same license, the LGPL or EPL.

Note that it is explicitly NOT NEEDED to put any application that is just using qooxdoo as intended by the framework under the LGPL or EPL (this is where the “weak” part comes into play - contrast this with the GPL, which would only allow using qooxdoo to create an application that is itselft governed by the GPL).

Parts of qooxdoo may be licensed under licenses that are compatible with the LGPL and the EPL. For instance, BSD-like licenses or source code that has been put into the public domain by its author can be used by qooxdoo. Files that include such source code under licenses different to LGPL/EPL mention those licenses explicitly.

The following text is from the content of the LICENSE file in the project’s top-level directory:

qooxdoo Licensing Information
=============================

qooxdoo may be used under the terms of either the

  * GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
    http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html

or the

  * Eclipse Public License (EPL)
    http://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/epl-v10.php

As a recipient of qooxdoo, you may choose which license to receive the code 
under. Certain files or entire directories may not be covered by this 
dual license, but are subject to licenses compatible to both LGPL and EPL.
License exceptions are explicitly declared in all relevant files or in a 
LICENSE file in the relevant directories.

The reason for the new EPL license in addition to the existing LGPL is that we want to allow Eclipse projects to make use of qooxdoo, e.g. the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP).

Unfortunately, this isn’t possible with the LGPL for reasons beyond our control. On the other hand we want people outside of Eclipse still to be able to use qooxdoo in their GPL or LGPL licensed applications. But because of the fact that the EPL is “incompatible” with the current LGPL/GPL, we could not simply switch to this license.

In fact it may well be that this incompatibility goes away with version 3.0 of the LGPL/GPL, but currently the clauses in the EPL regarding patents state an additional restriction that is forbidden by the GNU licenses. So the best way for us seemed to go down the dual-license road.

If you want to contribute code or other resources to qooxdoo, which would really be great , we ask you to fill out the following form and send it to us at license AT qooxdoo DOT org. This ensures that we have some paperwork from all substantial contributors that clearly states the acceptance of our licensing terms.

The qooxdoo project uses code or other contributions originally 
created by me,  <NAME>

I hereby grant the permission to license these contributions under a
dual license of LGPL/EPL, where LGPL is the GNU Lesser General 
Public License and EPL is the Eclipse Public License.

I also understand and agree that all future contributions I may make 
to the qooxdoo project must be governed by the same dual license 
LGPL/EPL to be qualified for inclusion into the project. This applies 
both to direct commits to the source code repository as well as to 
any other means that allow me to contribute code or other resources.

I understand the rights and obligations that are associated with 
these two licenses.

<DATE>

<YOUR NAME>

If you have any questions regarding the rights and obligations that come with qooxdoo’s license, please feel free to contact license AT qooxdoo DOT org.