Open Source Versus Commercial Licenses for the gSOAP Software
Parts of gSOAP are distributed under:
- The gSOAP Public License 1.3
(which is based on the Mozilla public license 1.1). Components
not covered by the gSOAP Public License are wsdl2h and its source code output, UDDI,
and several sample applications, see note below.
- GPL (GNU Public License, a common
open-source software license) covers all of gSOAP for non-commercial and educational use.
- Proprietary commercial software
development licenses for the standard edition.
The standard edition is exactly identical to the open
source version of gSOAP, but without the GPL licensing limitations. There is
also an enterprise edition that offers the gold standard toolset.
The
software is offered under GPL terms and conditions to allow the software to be used
with open source GPL projects, educational use, and so on. We do not accept
third-party GPL contributions to avoid having to fork the code base in GPL and
non-GPL.
Important note: for commercial use of the wsdl2h code generator, webserver,
UDDI code, and sample applications requires a commercial-use license. This means that
commercial use of wsdl2h to generate code for product development, or the use of
the UDDI source code, or the use of code from the sample Web service
applications requires a commercial software
development license. The reason for this is that the wsdl2h tool, UDDI and
some of the sample applications are not developed at Florida State University. Please
contact me by email if you have any questions on licensing and software support: engelen AT acm DOT org.
gSOAP and GPL
The GPL license is a common open-source license.
The GPL requires all software development to be open-sourced
under GPL, or GPL-compatible licenses, which excludes proprietary licenses.
The gSOAP software does not include any third-party GPL code. All software was
build from the ground up. Note that the GNU Bison and Flex tools are used to
generate source code for the gSOAP soapcpp2 compiler. However, the
Bison/Flex-generated source code is not restricted by the GPL or LGPL terms.
Non-GPL third-party contributions are included in the 'extras' directory in the
package and you are free to use these contributions. Suggested changes and
improvements by vendors were accepted under the public gSOAP license (not
GPL), which includes support for VxWorks and Apache and IIS modules for gSOAP.
The gSOAP Public License
The gSOAP Public License 1.3 is based on MPL1.1 (Mozilla
Public License 1.1).
The license allows for commercial and non-commercial use of gSOAP without fees
or royalties. It also allows
products to be built on top and distributed under any license (including commercial).
Products developed with gSOAP should include a notice of copyright and a disclaimer of warranty in the product's documentation (License Exhibit B).
The gSOAP public license requires modifications that are distributed as part
of an open source product based on gSOAP to be submitted back to us.
Note that the wsdl2h tool, UDDI code, Web server, and sample applications are
NOT covered by the gSOAP public license. These are offered under a choice of GPL or commercial licensing.
Questions? Please contact me by email at: engelen AT acm DOT org.